Restored to its original splendor, Montpelier is now a national shrine, but before Montpelier became a place of study and tribute, it was a home. Often kept from it by the business of the young nation, James and Dolley Madison could finally take up permanent residence when they retired from Washington in 1817. Their lifelong friend Thomas Jefferson predicted that, at Montpelier, the retiring Madison could return to his "books and farm, to tranquility, and independence," that he would be re...

George Washington’s vision was a presidency free of party, a republican, national office that would transcend faction. That vision would remain strong in the administrations of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, and John Quincy Adams, yet largely disappear under Andrew Jackson and his successors.This book is a comprehensive and pathbreaking study of the early presidency and the ideals behind it. Ralph Ketcham examines the roots of nonpartisan leadership in W...

Any searching look at the theory and practice of citizenship in the United States today is bewildering and disconcerting. Despite earnest concern for participation, access, and "leverage," there is a widespread perception that nothing citizens do has much meaning or influence. This book argues that for American democracy to work in the twenty-first century, renewed interest in teaching the nation's young citizens a sense of the public good is imperative.All of the nation's founders, especi...

The complete texts of the documents that tell the story of the clashes and compromises that gave birth to the Unites States of America.Should the members of the government be elected by direct vote of the people?Should the government be headed by a single executive, and how powerful should that executive be? Should immigrants be allowed into the United States?How should judges be appointed?What human rights should be safe from government in...

Roots of the Republic shows how the Constitution was a product, not simply of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, but of a legal and philosophical tradition almost two centuries old. The editors have selected eighteen key documents in the development of that tradition and reproduced them with essays that explain what they mean, why they were written, and why they are important today. Each key document is accompanied by an interpretive essay written by a contemporary scholar. These essay...

The best one volume biography of Madison's life, Ketcham's biography not only traces Madison's career, it gives readers a sense of the man. As Madison said of his early years in Virginia under the study of Donald Robertson, who introduced him to thinkers like Montaigne and Montesquieu, "all that I have been in life I owe largely to that man." It also captures a side of Madison that is less rarely on display (including a portrait of the beautiful Dolley Madison)."Madison's personali...

Although the last half of the twentieth century has been called the Age of Democracy, the twenty-first has already demonstrated the fragility of its apparent triumph as the dominant form of government throughout the world.Reassessing the fate of democracy for our time, distinguished political theorist Ralph Ketcham traces the evolution of this idea over the course of four hundred years. He traces democracy’s bumpy ride in a book that is both an exercise in the history of ideas and ...

An original collection of the most influential documents in American history, from the bestselling author of A Patriot's History of the United States.Since 2005, A Patriot's History of the United States has become a modern classic for its defense of America as a unique country founded on principles of justice, equality, and freedom for all.The Patriot's History Reader continues this tradition by going back to the original sources-...

This volume presents an eminent historian's progress over thirty years in trying to understand the American Revolution. Here is the historian at his best—beginning with the assumption that things are not always as they appear to be, delighting in the discovery of the previously unknown, and offering new interpretations with style, wit, and the good sense to know that there are always more questions to be answered.The Revolution is fertile ground for the historian's...

Pulitzer-Prize-winning author Bernard Bailyn brings us a book that combines portraits of American revolutionaries with a deft exploration of the ideas that moved them and still shape our society today.

The United States of America! It was in the Declaration of Independence that this name was first and formally proclaimed to the world, and to maintain its verity the war of the Revolution was fought. Americans like to think that they were then assuming among the Powers of the Earth the equal and independent Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them; and, in view of their subsequent marvelous development, they are inclined to add that it must have been before an e...

In these pages Silent Cal Coolidge focuses his famed terse eloquence on the nation's founders, not merely on George Washington's indispensable figure but also on:The Declaration of Independence and the ConstitutionAlexander HamiltonWashington's fellow Virginia patriotsThe Battles of Bunker Hill, Princeton, and TrentonEthan Allen's Green Mountain BoysBoston's Old North ChurchMethodist Episcopal Bishop Francis Asbury