The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams Review

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(More customer reviews)What a joy it is to read the correspondence between two of America's greatest founding fathers. Through this collection of letters we begin to get into the minds of men who created and shaped this nation. We read of their dreams, expectations and fears for this new nation as well as typical correspondence between friends. That is when they were talking to each other. When the two men weren't, Abigail continued to write Jefferson to try and heal the breach. My favorite letter is from John Adams to Jefferson to tell him to stop writing his wife. This is a book for anyone who loves the human side of history and enjoys getting to know the real people behind the legends. I first read it in college, and then spent ten years trying to find it again. Now that I have, it will never leave my bookshelf.

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An intellectual dialogue of the highest plane achieved in America, the correspondence between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson spanned half a century and embraced government, philosophy, religion, quotidiana, and family griefs and joys. First meeting as delegates to the Continental Congress in 1775, they initiated correspondence in 1777, negotiated jointly as ministers in Europe in the 1780s, and served the early Republic-each, ultimately, in its highest office. At Jefferson's defeat of Adams for the presidency in 1800, they became estranged, and the correspondence lapses from 1801 to 1812, then is renewed until the death of both in 1826, fifty years to the day after the Declaration of Independence.
Lester J. Cappon's edition, first published in 1959 in two volumes, provides the complete correspondence between these two men and includes the correspondence between Abigail Adams and Jefferson. Many of these letters have been published in no other modern edition, nor does any other edition devote itself exclusively to the exchange between Jefferson and the Adamses. Introduction, headnotes, and footnotes inform the reader without interrupting the speakers. This reissue of The Adams-Jefferson Letters in a one-volume unabridged edition brings to a broader audience one of the monuments of American scholarship and, to quote C. Vann Woodward, 'a major treasure of national literature.'

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The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American Hist) Review

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(More customer reviews)This outstanding book is generally regarded as fundamental to understanding the American Revolution. Wood immersed himself in contemporary writings including a huge array of political pamphlets, sermons, letters, and other texts in an attempt to reconstruct the thinking of the people who made the Revolution and the Constitution. Wood begins with a reconstruction of how colonial Americans perceived the political organization of their societies, their relationship with Britain, and how they conceived politics in general. The initial parts of the book parallel and draw from Bernard Bailyn's outstanding book, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Indeed, much of Wood's book can be seen as sequel to Bailyn's book.
Wood begins with a reconstruction of the pre-Revolutionary conception of politics. Like Bailyn, Wood reconstructs this as a compound of several elements but dominated by certain general Enlightenment concepts and the specific framework developed by dissident 18th century British Whig intellectuals. Basic concepts included the idea that political structure reflected basic social structures, that the 'people' embodied by parliamentary representation were opposed and oppressed by the Crown, and an obsession with 'corruption' induced by abuse of the executive power of the Crown.
The successful conclusion of the Revolution, however, did not produce the outcome predicted by this conception of politics. The resulting confederation and states were perceived by many American intellectuals as dominated by greed and self-interest, there was an absence of the expected moral regeneration, and there were increasing concerns about the power of state legislatures causing both abuse of minority rights and threats to social order.
The reaction to these problems produced a wholesale revision of American's conceptions of politics. In the period leading up to the formulation of the Constitution, many ideas that we accept as basic were formulated. The nascent and later explicit Federalists severed the coupling between social and political organization. This gave government an essentially independent role and represented a form of social engineering because the Federalists essentially depended on constructed institutions to guarantee social success rather than the prior emphasis on public virtue. The ideas of constitutionialism, large republics, delegation of sovereignty, mixed government with responsibility divided between states and the Federal government, and emphasis on social contracts as a source of authority all stem from this period.
Wood is careful to emphasize some particularly interesting aspects of this process. In some respects, the Federalist drive to constitutionalism was a reactionary act on the part of traditional elites who felt they were losing out in excessively egalitarian world created by the Revolution. The process was widely diffused. Important and generally recognized figures like Madison and James Wilson figure prominently in the story but Wood demonstrates how a host of other figures, many now obscure, contributed to and articulated this process.
In a sense, there were 2 American Revolutions. The first being actual revolt from the British Empire and the second being the dramatic change in political thought and institutions that followed the successful conclusion of that revolt. Wood does a wonderful job of delineating how this second revolution occurred.

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The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle over American History (The Public Square) Review

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(More customer reviews)The ad hominem attacks on Lepore and this book are as absurd as they are predictable. This is not intended to be a comprehensive book on American history or the revolutionary period. It sets out simply to record the ad nauseam remarks that have been made articulating the motivation of the so-called Tea Party, though Lepore in no way characterizes it as monolithic, and to cast it against what we know of the period being invoked to demonstrate how even a cursory knowledge of the people and events of that time necessarily problematizes the narrative they present, and thus raises doubts about its tidy simplicity. This does not really take much, for any expressed desire to "return to the intent of the founders" necessarily runs afoul of modern sensibilities on race, gender and class equality, given that the government they set up disenfranchised blacks, women and often those who did not own property. And in also analyzing Rifkin's leftist TEA (Tax Equity for All) Party of the early 1970s, Lepore makes clear that this distortion of history to serve a political narrative is nothing new nor is it the sole province of the Right. Thus her criticism over the (mis)use of history is aimed at both the Left and the Right, and also at the complacent scholars who have let it happen, notwithstanding the name-calling in negative reviews.
There is opinion in the work, to be sure, but there is also argument and evidence, two things that seem lacking in every ideological critique I have seen so far of this book (those that stop simply at "this is not conservative, ergo it's liberal, ergo don't read it"). As Lepore repeats several times over, this is what history is: a combative, contentious, argument (like all academic disciplines) over how best to read the evidence, not a simplistic narrative reflecting (conveniently) the ideological purposes of its espousers, and couched in little more complexity than is found in an elementary-school play. Even less so, as her heart-tugging description of school children learning about the Revolution at the close of the book (which begs comparison to many of her Tea Party interviews even if she does not expressly offer it as such) so neatly illustrates.
History (like all other scholarly pursuits) is complex and messy, and requires critical research to uncover a past that is remote from us. This is not some new, radical, theorem; it is the bedrock of all academic pursuits. That does indeed frustrate ideological, political narratives, but then, that's what stubborn facts usually do.

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Americans have always put the past to political ends. The Union laid claim to the Revolution--so did the Confederacy. Civil rights leaders said they were the true sons of liberty--so did Southern segregationists. This book tells the story of the centuries-long struggle over the meaning of the nation's founding, including the battle waged by the Tea Party, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and evangelical Christians to "take back America."

Jill Lepore, Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer, offers a wry and bemused look at American history according to the far right, from the "rant heard round the world," which launched the Tea Party, to the Texas School Board's adoption of a social-studies curriculum that teaches that the United States was established as a Christian nation. Along the way, she provides rare insight into the eighteenth-century struggle for independence--the real one, that is. Lepore traces the roots of the far right's reactionary history to the bicentennial in the 1970s, when no one could agree on what story a divided nation should tell about its unruly beginnings. Behind the Tea Party's Revolution, she argues, lies a nostalgic and even heartbreaking yearning for an imagined past--a time less troubled by ambiguity, strife, and uncertainty--a yearning for an America that never was.

The Whites of Their Eyes reveals that the far right has embraced a narrative about America's founding that is not only a fable but is also, finally, a variety of fundamentalism--anti-intellectual, antihistorical, and dangerously antipluralist.

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