Departing from traditional approaches to colonial legal history, Mary Sarah Bilder argues that American law and legal culture developed within the framework of an evolving, unwritten transatlantic constitution that lawyers, legislators, and litigants on both sides of the Atlantic understood. The central tenet of this constitution—that colonial laws and customs could not be repugnant to the laws of England but could diverge for local circumstances—shaped the legal development of the colonial world. Focusing on practices rather than doctrines, Bilder describes how the pragmatic and flexible conversation about this constitution shaped colonial law: the development of the legal profession; the place of English law in the colonies; the existence of equity courts and legislative equitable relief; property rights for women and inheritance laws; commercial law and currency reform; and laws governing religious establishment. Using as a case study the corporate colony of Rhode Island, which had the largest number of appeals of any mainland colony to the English Privy Council, she reconstructs a largely unknown world of pre-Constitutional legal culture.

Winner of the Bancroft Prize Winner of the James Bradford Best Biography Prize, Society for Historians of the Early American Republic Finalist, Literary Award for Nonfiction, Library of Virginia Finalist, George Washington Prize James Madison’s Notes on the 1787 Constitutional Convention have acquired nearly unquestioned authority as the description of the U.S. Constitution’s creation. No document provides a more complete record of the deliberations in Philadelphia or depicts the Convention’s charismatic figures, crushing disappointments, and miraculous triumphs with such narrative force. But how reliable is this account? “[A] superb study of the Constitutional Convention as selectively reflected in Madison’s voluminous notes on it...Scholars have been aware that Madison made revisions in the Notes but have not intensively explored them. Bilder has looked closely indeed at the Notes and at his revisions, and the result is this lucid, subtle book. It will be impossible to view Madison’s role at the convention and read his Notes in the same uncomplicated way again...An accessible and brilliant rethinking of a crucial moment in American history.” —Robert K. Landers, Wall Street Journal

Transatlantic Revolutionary Cultures, 1789-1861 argues that the revolutionary era constituted a coherent chapter in transatlantic history and that individual revolutions were connected to a broader, transatlantic and transnational frame. As a composite, the essays place instances of political upheaval during the long nineteenth century in Europe and the Americas in a common narrative and offer a new interpretation on their seeming asynchrony. In the age of revolutions the formation of political communities and cultural interactions were closely connected over time and space. Reciprocal connections arose from discussions on the nature of history, deliberations about constitutional models, as well as the reception of revolutions in popular culture. These various levels of cultural and intellectual interchange we term “transatlantic revolutionary cultures.” Contributors are: Ulrike Bock, Anne Bruch, Peter Fischer, Mischa Honeck, Raphael Hörmann, Charlotte A. Lerg, Marc H. Lerner, Michael L. Miller, Timothy Mason Roberts, and Heléna Tóth.

The dramatic story of the debate over the ratification of the Constitution, the first new account of this seminal moment in American history in years.

"A biography of Eliza Harriot Barons O'Connor, an educator whose 1787 Philadelphia public lecture attended by George Washington might have inspired the gender-neutral language of the Constitution. Explores women's public roles and political power following the American Revolution through the early nineteenth century, tracing the story of white and Black women's struggles for education and suffrage at a transformative moment"--

A history of the American Constitution's formative decades from a preeminent legal scholar When the US Constitution won popular approval in 1788, it was the culmination of thirty years of passionate argument over the nature of government. But ratification hardly ended the conversation. For the next half century, ordinary Americans and statesmen alike continued to wrestle with weighty questions in the halls of government and in the pages of newspapers. Should the nation's borders be expanded? Should America allow slavery to spread westward? What rights should Indian nations hold? What was the proper role of the judicial branch? In The Words that Made Us, Akhil Reed Amar unites history and law in a vivid narrative of the biggest constitutional questions early Americans confronted, and he expertly assesses the answers they offered. His account of the document's origins and consolidation is a guide for anyone seeking to properly understand America's Constitution today.

Tom Paine’s America explores the vibrant, transatlantic traffic in people, ideas, and texts that profoundly shaped American political debate in the 1790s. In 1789, when the Federal Constitution was ratified, "democracy" was a controversial term that very few Americans used to describe their new political system. That changed when the French Revolution—and the wave of democratic radicalism that it touched off around the Atlantic World—inspired a growing number of Americans to imagine and advocate for a wide range of political and social reforms that they proudly called "democratic." One of the figureheads of this new international movement was Tom Paine, the author of Common Sense. Although Paine spent the 1790s in Europe, his increasingly radical political writings from that decade were wildly popular in America. A cohort of democratic printers, newspaper editors, and booksellers stoked the fires of American politics by importing a flood of information and ideas from revolutionary Europe. Inspired by what they were learning from their contemporaries around the world, the evolving democratic opposition in America pushed their fellow citizens to consider a wide range of radical ideas regarding racial equality, economic justice, cosmopolitan conceptions of citizenship, and the construction of more literally democratic polities. In Europe such ideas quickly fell victim to a counter-Revolutionary backlash that defined Painite democracy as dangerous Jacobinism, and the story was much the same in America’s late 1790s. The Democratic Party that won the national election of 1800 was, ironically, the beneficiary of this backlash; for they were able to position themselves as the advocates of a more moderate, safe vision of democracy that differentiated itself from the supposedly aristocratic Federalists to their right and the dangerously democratic Painite Jacobins to their left.