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The Treason Trial of Aaron Burr
The Burr trial featured some of America's most gifted lawyers and pitted Marshall, Jefferson, and Burr in a three-way contest that tracked the political and cultural differences of the new republic. This book focuses on the complex interaction of legal doctrine, political ideology, and character in the lawmaking process. The law that came out of the trial – the rights of criminal defendants, the constitutional meaning of treason, and the separation of powers, indeed the rule of law itself – left a permanent mark on American history.
- $28.99 (Z)
Thomas Jefferson and American Nationhood
This book describes Thomas Jefferson as the essential teller of what he once called the "American Story" and argues that his confidence about America's greatness was rooted less in his famously cosmic optimism than in his extensive empirical assessment of American character, which he believed made a unique democratic politics possible here. Jefferson's opposition to Hamilton, architect of America's fiscal-military state, was less an opposition to government power than what Jefferson considered Hamilton's effort to administer a central state with its own rationale, largely disconnected from public will or America's unique character.
- $99.00 (C)
Freedom in a Slave Society
This book explores the relationship between freedom and slavery in the antebellum American South, studying authors who spoke for the Southwest's educated classes but often reached national readerships. Instead of treating freedom as an abstraction, this book analyzes the practical meanings attached to liberty by people who treasured it, even as they defended slavery. Juxtaposing what these Southerners wrote for a burgeoning print market with how they lived, in private and in public, this study sheds new light on the ethical paradox that plunged the United States into war.
- $99.00 (C)
