The publication of DNA test results showing that Thomas Jefferson was probably the father of one of his slave Sally Hemings's children has sparked a broad but often superficial debate. The editors of this volume have assembled some of the most distinguished American historians, including three Pulitzer Prize winners, and other experts on Jefferson, his times, race, and slavery. Their essays reflect the deeper questions the relationship between Hemings and Jefferson has raised about American history and national culture.
The DNA tests would not have been conducted had there not...
The publication of DNA test results showing that Thomas Jefferson was probably the father of one of his slave Sally Hemings's children has sparked ...
When Thomas Jefferson moved his victorious Republican administration into the new capital city in 1801, one of his first acts was to abolish any formal receptions, except on New Year's Day and the Fourth of July. His successful campaign for the presidency had been partially founded on the idea that his Federalist enemies had assumed dangerously aristocratic trappings--a sword for George Washington and a raised dais for Martha when she received people at social occasions--in the first capital cities of New York and Philadelphia. When the ladies of Washington City, determined to have their...
When Thomas Jefferson moved his victorious Republican administration into the new capital city in 1801, one of his first acts was to abolish any fo...
George W. Bush and Al Gore were by no means the first presidential hopefuls to find themselves embroiled in a hotly contested electoral impasse. Two hundred years earlier, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams endured arguably the most controversial and consequential election in American history. Focusing on the wide range of possible outcomes of the 1800-1801 melee, this collection of essays situates the American -Revolution of 1800- in a broad context of geo-political and racial developments in the Atlantic world as a whole. In essays written expressly for this volume, leading historians of...
George W. Bush and Al Gore were by no means the first presidential hopefuls to find themselves embroiled in a hotly contested electoral impasse. Tw...
George W. Bush and Al Gore were by no means the first presidential hopefuls to find themselves embroiled in a hotly contested electoral impasse. Two hundred years earlier, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams endured arguably the most controversial and consequential election in American history. Focusing on the wide range of possible outcomes of the 1800-1801 melee, this collection of essays situates the American "Revolution of 1800" in a broad context of geo-political and racial developments in the Atlantic world as a whole. In essays written expressly for this volume, leading historians of...
George W. Bush and Al Gore were by no means the first presidential hopefuls to find themselves embroiled in a hotly contested electoral impasse. Tw...
Although frequently attacked for their partisanship and undue political influence, the American media of today are objective and relatively ineffectual compared to their counterparts of two hundred years ago. From the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth century, newspapers were the republic's central political institutions, working components of the party system rather than commentators on it.
The Tyranny of Printers narrates the rise of this newspaper-based politics, in which editors became the chief party spokesmen and newspaper offices often served as local party...
Although frequently attacked for their partisanship and undue political influence, the American media of today are objective and relatively ineffec...
After examining American society in 1831-32, Alexis de Tocqueville concluded, -In no country in the world has the principle of association been more successfully used or applied to a greater multitude of objects than in America.- What he failed to note, however, was just how much experimentation and conflict, including partisan conflict, had gone into the evolution of these institutions. In -Let a Common Interest Bind Us Together- Associations, Partisanship, and Culture in Philadelphia, 1775-1840, Albrecht Koschnik examines voluntary associations in Philadelphia from the Revolution...
After examining American society in 1831-32, Alexis de Tocqueville concluded, -In no country in the world has the principle of association been mor...
In his probing new study, Francis Cogliano focuses on Thomas Jefferson's relation to history, both as the context in which he lived, and as something he made considerable, and conscious, efforts to influence. He was acutely aware that he would be judged by posterity, and he believed that the fate of the republican experiment depended to a large extent on how it was rendered by historians.The first half of the book situates Jefferson's ideas about history within the context of eighteenth-century historical thought. It then considers the efforts Jefferson made to shape the way the history of...
In his probing new study, Francis Cogliano focuses on Thomas Jefferson's relation to history, both as the context in which he lived, and as somethi...
In mid-April 1814, the Virginia congressman John Randolph of Roanoke had reason to brood over his family's decline since the American Revolution. The once-sumptuous world of the Virginia gentry was vanishing, its kinship ties crumbling along with its mansions, crushed by democratic leveling at home and a strong federal government in Washington, D.C. Looking back in an effort to grasp the changes around him, Randolph fixated on his stepfather and onetime guardian, St. George Tucker.
The son of a wealthy Bermuda merchant, Tucker had studied law at the College of William and Mary,...
In mid-April 1814, the Virginia congressman John Randolph of Roanoke had reason to brood over his family's decline since the American Revolution. T...
Distant Revolutions: 1848 and the Challenge to American Exceptionalism is a study of American politics, culture, and foreign relations in the mid-nineteenth century, illuminated through the reactions of Americans to the European revolutions of 1848. Flush from the recent American military victory over Mexico, many Americans celebrated news of democratic revolutions breaking out across Europe as a further sign of divine providence. Others thought that the 1848 revolutions served only to highlight how America's own revolution had not done enough in the way of reform. Still other...
Distant Revolutions: 1848 and the Challenge to American Exceptionalism is a study of American politics, culture, and foreign relations in t...
History has largely forgotten the writings, both public and private, of early nineteenth-century America's legal scholars. However, Ellen Holmes Pearson argues that the observers from this era had a unique perspective on the young nation and the directions in which its legal culture might go.
Remaking Custom draws on the law lectures, treatises, speeches, and papers of the early republic's legal scholars to examine the critical role that they played in the formation of American identities. As intermediaries between the founders of America's newly independent polities and the...
History has largely forgotten the writings, both public and private, of early nineteenth-century America's legal scholars. However, Ellen Holmes Pe...
