“No better brief chronological introduction to the period can be found.” —Wilson Quarterly In The Birth of the Republic, 1763–89, Edmund S. Morgan shows how the challenge of British taxation started Americans on a search for constitutional principles to protect their freedom, and eventually led to the Revolution. By demonstrating that the founding fathers’ political philosophy was not grounded in theory, but rather grew out of their own immediate needs, Morgan paints a vivid portrait of how the founders’ own experiences shaped their passionate convictions, and these in turn were incorporated into the Constitution and other governmental documents. The Birth of the Republic is the classic account of the beginnings of the American government, and in this fourth edition the original text is supplemented with a new foreword by Joseph J. Ellis and a historiographic essay by Rosemarie Zagarri. “The Birth of the Republic is particularly to be praised because of the sensible and judicious views offered by Morgan. He is unfair neither to Britain nor to the colonies.”—American Historical Review

Draws on Franklin's extensive writings to provide a portrait of the statesman, inventor, and Founding Father.

The growing conviction in London that measures had to be undertaken at the end of the French and Indian war to shore up British authority in the colonies was revealed by the stream of proposals for imperial reform that poured from the pens of Crown officials and other interested observers during the early 1760s.

"A masterly quarter-century of commentary on the discipline of American history."—Allen D. Boyer, New York Times Book Review "This book amounts to an intellectual autobiography....These pieces are thus a statement of what I have thought about early Americans during nearly seventy years in their company," writes historian Edmund S. Morgan in the introduction to this landmark collection. The Genuine Article gathers together twenty-five of Morgan's finest essays over forty years, commenting brilliantly on everything from Jamestown to James Madison. In revealing the private lives of "Those Sexy Puritans" and "The Price of Honor" on Southern plantations, The Genuine Article details the daily lives of early Americans, along with "The Great Political Fiction" that continues to this day. As one of our most celebrated historians, Morgan's characteristic insight and penetrating wisdom are not to be missed in this extraordinarily rich portrait of early America and its Founding Fathers.

More than any other single man, George Washington was responsible for bringing success to the American Revolution. But because of the heroic image in which we have cast him and which already enveloped him in this own lifetime, Washington is and was a hard man to know. In this book Edmund S. Morgan pushes past the image to find the man. He argues that Washington's genius lay in his understanding of both military and political power. This understanding of power was unmatched by that of any of his contemporaries and showed itself at the simplest level in the ability to take command. Drawing on Washington's letters to his colleagues (many of which are included in this book), Morgan explores the particular genius of our first president and clearly demonstrates that Washington's mastery of power allowed America to win the Revolutionary War and placed the new country on the way to achieving the international and domestic power that Washington himself had sought for it.

"The best explanation that I have seen for our distinctive combination of faith, hope and naiveté concerning the governmental process." —Michael Kamman, Washington Post This book makes the provocative case here that America has remained politically stable because the Founding Fathers invented the idea of the American people and used it to impose a government on the new nation. His landmark analysis shows how the notion of popular sovereignty—the unexpected offspring of an older, equally fictional notion, the "divine right of kings"—has worked in our history and remains a political force today.

This title was first published in 2003. Problem pictures were very popular during the Edwardian period. These pictures invited multiple interpretations of modern life and were often slightly risque. Pamela Fletcher explores how these works of art engaged with questions of gender, sexuality and identity during their heyday.