The articles provide a rich basis for discussion of the American Founding, its background, and its development over the first few decades of the United States’ existence.

David Womersley is the Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. He has published widely on English literature from the early sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries. He is the editor of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (2012) for Cambridge University Press.

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Wilson’s writings and speeches had a significant impact on the deliberations that produced the cornerstone documents of our democracy. Wilson’s signal contribution to the founding of our national government was his advocacy for both a strong national government and an open and democratic political system, a position that set him apart from both Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson.

James Wilson (1742–1798) emigrated from Scotland in 1765 and was one of the major architects of the American judicial system.

Kermit L. Hall (1944–2006) was the President of the State University of New York at Albany as well as Professor of History at the same institution.

Mark David Hall is Herbert Hoover Distinguished Professor of Political Science at George Fox University.

Maynard Garrison is a retired attorney. He received his law degree from Stanford University.

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While Washington is recognized as a military leader and the great symbolic figure of the early republic, many fail to appreciate the full measure of his contributions to the country. In these selections, his political ideas and judgments stand out with remarkable clarity. His writings are replete with sustained, thoughtful commentary and keen political insight.

This volume includes correspondence, all of his presidential addresses, various public proclamations, his last will and testament, and the most comprehensive recompilation of the “discarded first inaugural” ever printed.

W. B. Allen is Professor of Political Philosophy and Director of the Program in Public Policy and Administration at Michigan State University.

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Steeped in the classical, republican tradition, Warren was a strong proponent of the American Revolution. She was also suspicious of the newly emerging commercial republic of the 1780s and hostile to the Constitution from an Anti-Federalist perspective, a position that gave her history some notoriety.

Lester H. Cohen taught history and American Studies at Purdue University.

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Clyde N. Wilson is Professor of History and editor of The Papers of John C. Calhoun at the University of South Carolina.

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Charles C. Thach, Jr. (1894–1966) was educated at Johns Hopkins University and received his Ph.D. in 1922. Specializing in political theory, he taught at the University of Minnesota and Johns Hopkins. He later became a Professor of Government at New York University, where he taught for over thirty years.

Forrest McDonald is Professor Emeritus of American History at the University of Alabama and author of States’ Rights and the Union.

The post The Creation of the Presidency, 1775–1789 appeared first on Liberty Fund.

As an early discussion of the principles of governmental power and their relationship to political economy and liberty, Tyranny Unmasked is an important primary source in the study of American history and political thought.

F. Thornton Miller is Assistant Professor of History at Southwest Missouri State University.

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M. E. Bradford was Professor of English at the University of Dallas until his death in 1993.

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Michael Zuckert is Nancy Reeves Dreux Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame.

Derek A. Webb is a Fellow at Stanford Law School’s Center for Constitutional Law.

The post The Anti-Federalist Writings of the Melancton Smith Circle appeared first on Liberty Fund.

At the Federal Convention of 1787 he spoke more times than all but three delegates and was the driving force behind the Connecticut Compromise. As a Representative and Senator in the new republic, he played critical roles in debates over the Bill of Rights, the assumption of state debts, and the creation of a national bank. He was also one of the leading political leaders in Connecticut for the latter part of the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, no book dedicated to his writings has ever been published. Collected Works of Roger Sherman brings together essays, documents, records of his remarks in the Constitutional Convention and in the First Federal Congress, and important representative letters Sherman wrote to a variety of correspondents, including:

1768 letter to William Samuel Johnson, emphasizing Parliament’s limited authority over the colonies

1772 letter to the theologian Joseph Bellamy, criticizing Bellamy’s position on a congregation’s ability to fire its minister

1777 letter to Richard Henry Lee, addressing a number of economic issues

1789 series of letters between Sherman and John Adams, exploring the nature of republican government and the proper scope of presidential power.

Mark David Hall is Herbert Hoover Distinguished Professor of Politics and Faculty Fellow in the William Penn Honors Program at George Fox University. In addition to editing, with Kermit L. Hall, the Collected Works of James Wilson (Liberty Fund, 2007) and, with Daniel L. Dreisbach, The Sacred Rights of Conscience: Selected Readings on Religious Liberty and Church-State Relations in the American Founding (Liberty Fund, 2009), he has written Roger Sherman and the Creation of the American Republic (Oxford University Press, 2013).

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