Search results for ""Author R. B. Bernstein""

The Founding Fathers is a concise, accessible overview of the brilliant, flawed, and quarrelsome group of lawyers, politicians, merchants, military men, and clergy known as "the Founding Fathers"--who got as close to the ideal of the Platonic "philosopher-kings" as American or world history has ever seen. R. B. Bernstein reveals Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton, and the other founders not as shining demigods but as imperfect human beings--people much like us--who nevertheless achieved political greatness. They emerge here as men who sought to transcend their intellectual world even as they were bound by its limits, men who strove to lead the new nation even as they had to defer to the great body of the people and learn with them the possibilities and limitations of politics. Bernstein deftly traces the dynamic forces that molded these men and their contemporaries as British colonists in North America and as intellectual citizens of the Atlantic civilization's Age of Enlightenment. He analyzes the American Revolution, the framing and adoption of state and federal constitutions, and the key concepts and problems that both shaped and circumscribed the founders' achievements as the United States sought its place in the world. Finally, he charts the shifting reputations of the founders and examines the specific ways that interpreters of the Constitution have used the Founding Fathers. A masterly blend of old and new scholarship, brimming with apt description and insightful analysis, this book offers a digestible account of how the Founding Fathers were formed, what they did, and how generations of Americans have viewed them.

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The Education of John Adams is a concise biography of John Adams (1735-1826), the first by a biographer with legal training. It examines his origins in colonial Massachusetts, his education, and his struggle to choose a career and define a place for himself in colonial society. It explores his flourishing legal career and the impact that law had on him and his perception of himself; his growing involvement with the emerging American Revolution as polemicist, as lawyer, as congressional delegate, and as diplomat; and his role in defining and expounding ideas about constitutionalism and how it should work as the governing ideology of the new United States. The book traces his part in launching the new government of the United States under the U.S. Constitution; his service as the nation's first vice president and second president; and his retirement years, during which he passed from being a vexed and rejected ex-president to the Sage of Braintree. It describes the relationships that sustained him--with his wife, the brilliant and eloquent Abigail Adams; with his children; with such allies and supporters as Benjamin Rush and John Marshall; such sometime friends and sometime adversaries as Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson; and with such foes as Alexander Hamilton and Timothy Pickering. It establishes Adams as a key but neglected figure in the evolution of American constitutional theory and practice. It also is the first biography to examine Adams's conflicted and hesitant ideas about slavery and race in the American context, raising serious questions about his mythic status as a friend of human equality and a foe of slavery. The focus of this book is the record left by Adams himself - in diaries, letters, essays, pamphlets, and books. The Education of John Adams concludes by re-examining the often-debated question of the relevance of Adams's thought to our own time.

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In Hamilton: The Energetic Founder, R. B. Bernstein provides a thorough history that reveals Hamilton's status as one of the key founding fathers of the United States. Hamilton: The Energetic Founder is a brief introduction to the life, thought, work, and legacy of Alexander Hamilton (1755-1804), but it is not a traditional biography. Public curiosity about Hamilton, his life, and his work has swelled, particularly among those intrigued by popular-culture portrayals in the Broadway musical Hamilton: An American Musical. This book presents a summary of Hamilton's life and explores his role in revolution, constitutionalism, economics, diplomacy, and war, as well as his relationship to honor culture and duelling. The epilogue considers Hamilton's legacies. The book considers Hamilton as a key founding father, focusing on his work as a politician, a constitutional thinker, and the nation's first secretary of the treasury. In that role, Hamilton was perhaps the leading American domestic policy-maker and nationalist. He led the effort to write the brilliant defense and exposition of the Constitution, The Federalist, and later, as treasury secretary, he pioneered efforts to interpret the Constitution broadly, as a generous grant of national power to the government of the United States. As part of that effort, he also pioneered expositions of the Constitution as a source of executive and judicial power. In addition, as a leading figure in the American world of honor culture, Hamilton was also a principal exponent of political combat in defense of personal and political honor. As such, he was a tragic victim of the honor culture he did so much to establish as a component of national politics, dying as the result of a mortal wound he suffered in his 1804 duel with Aaron Burr, his longtime antagonist and Vice President of the United States. Though not often an admired political figure in his own time, Hamilton was perhaps the leading and most enthusiastic exponent of American constitutional nationalism. In the more than two centuries since his death in 1804, Hamilton has continued to be the principal advocate of a nationalist reading of US constitutionalism.

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One of the academy’s leading legal historians, William E. Nelson is the Edward Weinfeld Professor of Law at New York University School of Law. For more than four decades, Nelson has produced some of the most original and creative work on American constitutional and legal history. His prize-winning books have blazed new trails for historians with their substantive arguments and the scope and depth of Nelson’s exploration of primary sources. Nelson was the first legal scholar to use early American county court records as sources of legal and social history, and his work (on legal history in England, colonial America, and New York) has been a model for generations of legal historians. This book collects ten essays exemplifying and explaining the process of identifying and interpreting archival sources—the foundation of an array of methods of writing American legal history. The essays presented here span the full range of American history from the colonial era to the 1980s.Each historian has either identified a body of sources not previously explored or devised a new method of interrogating sources already known.The result is a kaleidoscopic examination of the historian’s task and of the research methods and interpretative strategies that characterize the rich, complex field of American constitutional and legal history.

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