San Antonio College Library

America's leading constitutional historian presents the first history of states' rights in the United States, surveying the concept's history from the Declaration of Independence to the end of Reconstruction. McDonald (history, U. of Alabama) explores the balance between general and local authority in government. Tracing the concept of states' rights from the Declaration of Independence to the end of Reconstruction, he illuminates the constitutional,...

First translation by Jerry Neeb-Crippen made from a text with "substantial deletions" by the author. Richard Leffler and the author revised the first three chapters of the translation; then Leffler and Kaminski finished the editing. (p. ix).

In this remarkable book, the historian Jack Rakove shows how the private lives of these men were suddenly transformed into public careers--how Washington became a strategist, Franklin a pioneering cultural diplomat, Madison a sophisticated constitutional thinker, and Hamilton a brilliant policymaker. Rakove shakes off accepted notions of these men as godlike visionaries, focusing instead on the evolution of their ideas and the crystallizing of their...

"Moral paragon, public servant, founding father; scoundrel, opportunist, womanizing phony: There are many Benjamin Franklins. Now, as we celebrate the tercentenary of Franklin's birth, Jerry Weinberger reveals the Franklin behind the many masks and shows that the real Franklin was far more remarkable than anyone has yet discovered." "Taking the Autobiography as the key to Franklin's thought, Weinberger argues that previous assessments have not yet...

"A culminating work on the American Founding by one of its leading historians, The Cause rethinks the American Revolution as we have known it. George Washington claimed that anyone who attempted to provide an accurate account of the war for independence would be accused of writing fiction. At the time, no one called it the "American Revolution": former colonists still regarded themselves as Virginians or Pennsylvanians, not Americans, while John Adams...

The Founding Fathers on Leadership takes you into the world of "team leaders" Thomas Paine, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison as they mapped strategy, forged consensus, picked the right staff people - such heretofore unproven talents as Lafayette and John Paul Jones - and made crucial decisions and daring choices. From Washington's recapture of Boston - achieved through intimidating, outmaneuvering, and outsmarting the British...

The story of the American nation begins with the founding of the Jamestown and Plymouth colonies, interactions with Native American peoples, the hardships and dangers that faced the colonists, the origins of the slave trade and a slave-dependent economy, and the tensions that developed between Britain and her New World territories as the colonies grew stronger and more self-sufficient.

Historian Maier shows us the Declaration as both the defining statement of our national identity and the moral standard by which we live as a nation. It is truly "American Scripture," and Maier tells us how it came to be. She describes the transformation of the Second Continental Congress into a national government, unlike anything that preceded or followed it. She lets us hear the voice of the people as revealed in other "declarations" of 1776. Detective-like,...

New attention from historians and journalists is raising pointed questions about the founding period: was the American revolution waged to preserve slavery, and was the Constitution a pact with slavery or a landmark in the antislavery movement? Leaders of the founding who called for American liberty are scrutinized for enslaving Black people themselves: George Washington consistently refused to recognize the freedom of those who escaped his Mount...