Founding America: Documents from the Revolution to the Bill of Rights (Barnes & Noble Classics) [Paperback]

Various (Author), Jack N. Rakove (Introduction)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 2006

Founding America: Documents from the Revolution to the Bill of Rights, by Various, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:

All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.

 

Modern American politicians refer to “the founders” so often that they’re in danger of becoming clichés. But Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abigail and John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, James Madison, James Monroe, and the other authors included in this new collection were a wholly unique—and complex—group of individuals, graced with extraordinary intellectual powers, a profound dedication to their ideals, and a striking ability to articulate those ideals in clear and passionate prose.

 

This original anthology of their writings, many of them far less familiar to us than they should be, demonstrates the depth of their thinking—and of their disagreements. It covers the full range of events from 1773 to 1789: that is, from the early debates about whether the North American colonies should declare their independence from England, to the ratification of the Constitution and the first ten amendments (the Bill of Rights).

 

Among the documents included are papers from the first and second Continental Congresses, the Articles of Confederation, Washington’s Farewell Address to his armies, and extensive excerpts from the Federalist papers and the Madison–Jefferson correspondence on the Constitution.

 

Jack N. Rakove is W.  R. Coe Professor of History and American Studies and Professor of Political Science at Stanford University, where he has taught since 1980. He is the author of four books on the American Revolutionary era, including The Beginnings of National Politics: An Interpretive History of the Continental Congress, James Madison and the Creation of the American Republic, and Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution, which received the 1997 Pulitzer Prize in History.

Editorial Reviews

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

From Jack N. Rakove's Introduction to Founding America

 

A decade after signing the Declaration of Independence, the Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush made an important observation that historians are fond of citing. “There is nothing more common than to confound the terms of the American revolution with those of the late American war,” Rush wrote in 1786. “The American war is over; but this is far from being the case with the American revolution. On the contrary, nothing but the first act of the great drama is closed.”

As Rush recognized, the events he consciously called a revolution had two main elements. The first, the one that had ended successfully only three years earlier, was to secure political independence from Great Britain. That story hinges on two great questions. First, how did the colonists move from resistance to revolution, from seeking to maintain their rights within the British Empire to renouncing its authority entirely? Second, once the last hopes for reconciliation had evaporated, how did the Americans prevail in a long and difficult military struggle against the greatest power in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world?

But winning independence, Rush also recognized, was only one part of the story. In his mind, the Revolution was more than a struggle for independence and home rule. It had also become a movement to establish new forms of government, modeled on republican principles that made the people the only proper source of political authority. Rush devoted the remainder of his essay to discussing how this new form of government could be “perfected.” Within a year, this effort culminated in the form of the federal Constitution drafted at Philadelphia in the summer of 1787, a Constitution whose first stated purpose was “to form a more perfect union.”

These two great themes—the achievement of independence and the “perfection” of republican governments—are the subject of the documents collected in this volume. These documents cannot capture the experience of the Revolution in its totality. No single volume, however carefully edited, could illustrate the diversity of experience and the range of issues that were felt and voiced during the quarter century of history that separates the beginning of the crisis with Britain in the mid-1760s from the adoption of the Constitution in the late 1780s.

When Benjamin Rush spoke of the Revolutionary War, he meant both the movement that led to independence and the military struggle that secured it. Defined in this way, the revolution really began in the mid-1760s, when the colonists first argued that Parliament had no authority to impose taxes or other laws on a people who sent no representatives of their own to distant London. In the crises over the Stamp Act (1765–1766) and the Townshend duties (1767–1770), Americans and Britons defined and sharpened their arguments about the nature of the British Empire and the rights and duties of its American colonies.

Product Details

• Paperback: 672 pages
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble Classics (April 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1593082304
• ISBN-13: 978-1593082307
• Product Dimensions: 2 x 5.2 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #683,187 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)