Early Republic

People of the Founding Era is a powerful new online resource that provides biographical information for thousands of individuals active during a crucial period in our history. Beginning with 12,000 but eventually expanding to over 60,000 people born between 1713... More

One of the outstanding documentary editions in American scholarship, The Adams Papers collects the correspondence and other significant papers of our nation's first great political family. At the center, of course, is John Adams. Beginning with his early diaries and three volumes... More

Containing over 2,400 letters, with another thousand letters to follow in periodic updates, this XML-based archive allows users to perform simple or advanced searches by period, correspondent, or topic. The letters may also be accessed directly through a sortable list or read in... More

All 59 volumes of the celebrated print edition published through 2009, encompassing five series and the complete diaries, are now available in one XML-based publication. Users may search on full text and by date, author, and recipient. The exceptional indexing of the print volumes is... More

The Papers of James Madison documents the life and work of one of the most important political and constitutional thinkers in our nation’s history. A vital project that continues to add new volumes, this publication has been consulted for decades by scholars and students for primary-... More

John Marshall was the longest-serving chief justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, with a tenure lasting more than three decades. He was also arguably the most influential. Under his leadership the court defined itself in ways that persist to this day. Available for the... More

Crucial to our nation’s history as author of the Declaration of Independence and third president, Thomas Jefferson was also a major figure in the Enlightenment, representing for Europeans the embodiment of the early nineteenth-century American mind. Since 1950, his writings have been... More

The careers of few figures in American history have encompassed as much as did John Jay’s. His accomplishments span pre- and post-Revolutionary history and extend into all three branches of government. Best known as the first chief justice of the Supreme Court, Jay entered public service... More

Now with links to Library of Congress manuscript facsimiles Andrew Jackson was born near the border of the colonial Carolinas and would take part in many of the early republic’s signal events, but he came to define a new era in American history and left the presidency forever... More

In Preserving the White Man’s Republic, Joshua Lynn reveals how the national Democratic Party rebranded majoritarian democracy and liberal individualism as conservative means for white men in the South and North to preserve their mastery on the eve of the Civil War.Responding to fears of African... More

George Washington’s life has been scrutinized by historians over the past three centuries, but the day-to-day lives of Mount Vernon’s enslaved workers, who left few written records but made up 90 percent of the estate’s population, have been largely left out of the story.In "The Only Unavoidable... More

In The Road to Guilford Courthouse, one of the most acclaimed military histories of the Revolutionary War ever written, John Buchanan explored the first half of the critical Southern Campaign and introduced readers to its brilliant architect, Major General Nathanael Greene. In this long-awaited... More

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George Washington had contact with Native Americans throughout most of his life. His first encounter as a teenager left him with the impression that they were nothing more than an "ignorant people." As a young man he fought both alongside and against Native Americans during the French and Indian... More

For biographers and fans of Dolley Payne Todd Madison, Mary Cutts's memoir of her famous aunt has been indispensable. Because Madison left behind no account of her life, the common assumption has been that Cutts’s account is the closest we have to Madison's autobiographical voice. With this new,... More

In the autumn of 1751, at the age of nineteen, George Washington sailed with his older half-brother Lawrence from Virginia to the Caribbean island of Barbados—the one and only time that the future Revolutionary War hero and president would leave the shores of continental North America. Lawrence had... More

The fourth volume of this series encompasses Robert Treat Paine’s time as Massachusetts attorney general. Paine, best known as a signer of the Declaration of Independence, spent the remainder of his public career in state service. The documents in this volume highlight the quest for order in a... More

Young Continental soldiers carried a heavy burden in the American Revolution. Their experiences of coming of age during the upheavals of war provide a novel perspective on the Revolutionary era, eliciting questions of gender, family life, economic goals, and politics. "Going for a soldier" forced... More

Near the end of a nine-month confrontation preceding the Compromise of 1850, Abraham Venable warned his fellow congressmen that "words become things." Indeed, in politics—then, as now—rhetoric makes reality. But while the legislative maneuvering, factional alignments, and specific measures of the... More

In Pulpit and Nation, Spencer McBride highlights the importance of Protestant clergymen in early American political culture, elucidating the actual role of religion in the founding era. Beginning with colonial precedents for clerical involvement in politics and concluding with false rumors of... More

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Why did Thomas Jefferson, who claimed to abhor war and fear standing armies, in 1802 establish the United States Military Academy? For more than two centuries this question has received scant attention, despite the significant contributions of both Jefferson and West Point to American history.... More

On January 5, 1799, a day that was "cold and like for Snow," Gouverneur Morris left the city of New York after dinner and then, as he recorded in his diary, went "to my House at Morrisania, where I arrive at Dusk after an Absence of above ten Years." Those ten years had been spent in the ferment of... More

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Both in the popular imagination and in academic discourse, North and South are presented as fundamentally divergent penal systems in the aftermath of the Civil War, a difference mapped onto larger perceived cultural disparities between the two regions. The South’s post Civil War embrace of chain... More