We have just launched an exciting project on the NCC’s website: The Founders’ Library. In it, you can read primary texts that span American constitutional history—from the philosophical works that influenced the Founding generation, to the most important speeches, essays, books, pamphlets, petitions, letters, court cases, landmark statutes, and state constitutions that have shaped the American constitutional tradition. To ensure nonpartisan rigor and ideological diversity, we assembled a group of leading scholars from diverse perspectives to help choose the sources included in the document library. Two of those scholars—Paul Rahe of Hillsdale College and Jonathan Gienapp from Stanford University—join host Jeffrey Rosen today to discuss some of the early texts from the Founders’ Library.
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This episode was produced by Melody Rowell and engineered by Greg Scheckler. Research was provided by Sam Desai and Lana Ulrich.
Participants
Paul A. Rahe is Professor of History and Charles O. Lee and Louise K. Lee Chair in the Western Heritage at Hillsdale College. Along with Professor Colleen Sheehan, he selected the sources in the Intellectual Foundations section of the Founders’ Library. Though trained in Greek and Roman history, he has published extensively in French history, in American history, and on early modern European thought as well, and he teaches everything from Greek and Roman history, Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato’s Republic and Laws, and Aristotle’s Politics to Machiavelli, Erasmus, More, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Hobbes, Locke, Mandeville, Shaftesbury, Montesquieu, Hume, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, the American Revolution, the American Constitutional Convention, The Federalist, Rousseau, and Tocqueville. His most recent book is Sparta’s Second Attic War: The Grand Strategy of Sparta, 446-418 BC.
Jonathan Gienapp is an Associate Professor of History at Stanford University. He is a scholar of Revolutionary and early republican America specializing in the period’s constitutionalism, political culture, legal history, and intellectual history. Along with Professor Bill Allen, he selected the sources for the Founding era section of the Founders’ Library. His first book, The Second Creation: Fixing the American Constitution in the Founding Era (2018), rethinks the conventional story of American constitutional creation by exploring how and why founding-era Americans’ understanding of their Constitution transformed in the earliest years of the document’s existence.
Jeffrey Rosen is the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization devoted to educating the public about the U.S. Constitution. Rosen is also professor of law at The George Washington University Law School and a contributing editor of The Atlantic.
Additional Resources
- Read Professor Rahe’s picks from the Intellectual Foundations of the American Founding (Before 1750):
- Thucydides — Thucydides, The War between the Athenians and the Peloponnesians (ca. 431-400 BC)
- Bacon & Hobbes (together) — Francis Bacon, “Selected Excerpts” (1620) and Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme and Power of a Common Wealth Ecclesiastical and Civil (1651)
- James Harrington — James Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656)
- Locke – religious toleration, right to revolution — John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) and Two Treatises on Government (1690)
- Hume & Adam Smith — David Hume, Essays Moral, Political and Literary (1741-58) and Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776)
- Montesquieu — Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (1748)
- Read Professor Gienapp’s picks from the Founding Era (1750-1790):
- John Dickinson, Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies (1768)
- William Cushing, Instructions to the Jury in the Quock Walker Case, Commonwealth of Massachusetts v. Nathaniel Jennison (1783)
- James Iredell, To the Public (1786)
- George Mason, Objections to the Constitution of Government formed by the Convention (1787)
- Noah Webster, An Examination into the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution (1787)
- James Madison, Federalist 37 (1788)
- Alexander Hamilton, Federalist 70 (part of Federalist 68, 70, 72) (1788)
TRANSCRIPT
This transcript may not be in its final form, accuracy may vary, and it may be updated or revised in the future.
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