Thomas Jefferson read Latin and Greek authors throughout his life and wrote movingly about his love of the ancient texts, which he thought should be at the core of America's curriculum. Yet at the same time, Jefferson warned his countrymen not to look to the ancient world for modern lessons and deplored many of the ways his peers used classical authors to address contemporary questions. As a result, the contribution of the ancient world to the thought of America's most classically educated Founding Father remains difficult to assess.

This volume brings together historians of political...

Between Sovereignty and Anarchy considers the conceptual and political problem of violence in the early modern Anglo-Atlantic, charting an innovative approach to the history of the American Revolution. Its editors and contributors contend that existing scholarship on the Revolution largely ignores questions of power and downplays the Revolution as a contest over sovereignty. Contributors employ a variety of methodologies to examine diverse themes, ranging from how Atlantic perspectives can redefine our understanding of revolutionary origins, to the ways in which political culture,...

The essays in Empire and Nation challenge facile assumptions about the -exceptional- character of the republic's founding moment, even as they invite readers to think anew about the complex ways in which the Revolution reshaped both American society and the Atlantic world.

How did events and ideas from elsewhere in the British empire influence development in the thirteen American colonies? And what was the effect of the American Revolution on the wider Atlantic world? In Empire and Nation, leading historians reconsider the American Revolution as a transnational event, with...

Thomas Jefferson is often portrayed as a hopelessly enigmatic figure--a riddle--a man so riven with contradictions that he is almost impossible to know. Lauded as the most articulate voice of American freedom and equality, even as he held people--including his own family--in bondage, Jefferson is variably described as a hypocrite, an atheist, or a simple-minded proponent of limited government who expected all Americans to be farmers forever.

Now, Annette Gordon-Reed teams up with America's leading Jefferson scholar, Peter S. Onuf, to present an absorbing and revealing character study...

Hailed by critics and embraced by readers, -Most Blessed of the Patriarchs- is one of the richest and most insightful accounts of Thomas Jefferson in a generation. Following her Pulitzer Prize-winning The Hemingses of Monticello, Annette Gordon-Reed has teamed with Peter S. Onuf to present a provocative and absorbing character study, -a fresh and layered analysis- (New York Times Book Review) that reveals our third president as -a dynamic, complex and oftentimes contradictory human being- (Chicago Tribune). Gordon-Reed and Onuf fundamentally challenge...