Here is a concise scholarly yet accessible overview of the brilliant flawed and quarrelsome group of lawyers politicians merchants military men and clergy known as "the Founding Fathers"--who got as close to the ideal of the Platonic "philosopher-kings" as American or world history has ever seen. In The Founding Fathers Reconsidered R. B. Bernstein reveals Washington Franklin Jefferson Adams Hamilton and the other founders not as shining demigods but as imperfect human beings--people much ...

Alexander Hamilton (1755–1804) was a key founding father—a politician, a constitutional thinker, and the nation’s first secretary of the treasury. He led the effort to write the brilliant defense and exposition of the Constitution, The Federalist, and later, as the nation’s first treasurysecretary, he pioneered efforts to interpret the Constitution broadly, as a source of executive and judicial power.Finding his purpose in the American Revolution and in its sequel, the creat...

The Education of John Adams is the first biography of John Adams by a biographer with legal training. It examines his origins in colonial Massachusetts, his education, and his struggle to choose a career and define a place for himself in colonial society. It explores the flowering of his legal career and the impact that law had on him and his understanding of himself; his growing involvement with the American Revolution as polemicist, as lawyer, as congressional delegate, and as d...