This book has developed from a study that was first undertaken a number of years ago, when Howard Mumford Jones, then editor-in-chief of the John Harvard Library, invited me to prepare a collection of pamphlets of the American Revolution for publication in that series. The full bibliography of pamphlets relating to the Anglo-American struggle published in the colonies through the year 1776 contains not a dozen or so items but over four hundred. In...

This classic work explains the evolution of American political thought from the Declaration of Independence to the ratification of the Constitution. In so doing, it illuminates the origins of the present American political system.