American Founding
Liberty Fund’s books about the American Founding era include critical primary sources and other writings that helped shape the nation's cultural, religious, and historical tradition. The writings reveal the character of American discourse about such crucial issues as the nature and importance of local government, the purposes of federal union, and the role of religion in America’s drive for liberty.
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An Essay on the Life of the Honourable Major-General Israel Putnam
by David Humphreys
/ Learn MoreDavid Humphreys was aide-de-camp to Washington during the American Revolution. His Life of Israel Putnam, originally published in 1788, has rightly been described as “the first biography of an American written by an American.” It is, as William C. Dowling observes, “a classic of revolutionary writing, very readable and immensely interesting in what it says about the temper of the…
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Essays by “The Free Republican,” 1784-1786
by Benjamin Lincoln, Jr.
/ Learn MoreThis is the first modern publication of ten essays published in the popular Boston newspaper The Independent Chronicle, a significant intellectual event in Massachusetts politics. The essays deal primarily with the problem of mixed government in a republic. Lincoln writes, “Two distinct and different orders of men seems incident to every society,” and these “two contending interests,” fed by a…
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Fame and the Founding Fathers
by Douglass Adair
/ Learn MoreThe fifteen articles, essays, notes, and documents gathered in this collection are a permanent contribution to study of the American founding. As teacher, critic, and editor of the William & Mary Quarterly, Adair demonstrated what Trevor Colbourn—one of his principal students—describes as an “extraordinary ability to enter empathetically into the experience and ideology of the Founding Fathers while at the…
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The Federalist
by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
/ Learn MoreThe Federalist, by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, constitutes a text central to the American political tradition. Written and published in newspapers in 1787 and 1788 to explain and promote ratification of the proposed Constitution for the United States, which were then bound by the Articles of Confederation, The Federalist remains of singular importance to students of liberty…
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The Founders’ Constitution (5 vol set)
by Philip B. Kurland and Ralph Lerner
/ Learn MoreA triumph of primary-source research, The Founders’ Constitution is a brilliant five-volume series that presents “extracts from all the leading works of political theory, history, law, and constitutional argument on which the Framers and their contemporaries drew and which they themselves produced.” The documentary sources and inspirations of The Founders’ Constitution reach to the early seventeenth century and extend through…
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The Founders’ Constitution – Vol 5
by Philip B. Kurland and Ralph Lerner
/ Learn MoreThe documentary sources and inspirations of The Founders’ Constitution reach to the early seventeenth century and extend through those Amendments to the Constitution that were adopted by 1835. In cooperation with the University of Chicago Press, Liberty Fund has prepared a new online edition of the entire work at: http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/ Philip B. Kurland was the William R. Kenan, Jr.,…
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The Founders’ Constitution – Vol 3
by Philip B. Kurland and Ralph Lerner
/ Learn MoreThe documentary sources and inspirations of The Founders’ Constitution reach to the early seventeenth century and extend through those Amendments to the Constitution that were adopted by 1835. In cooperation with the University of Chicago Press, Liberty Fund has prepared a new online edition of the entire work at: http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/ Philip B. Kurland was the William R. Kenan, Jr.,…
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The Founders’ Constitution – Vol 4
by Philip B. Kurland and Ralph Lerner
/ Learn MoreThe documentary sources and inspirations of The Founders’ Constitution reach to the early seventeenth century and extend through those Amendments to the Constitution that were adopted by 1835. In cooperation with the University of Chicago Press, Liberty Fund has prepared a new online edition of the entire work at: http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/ Philip B. Kurland was the William R. Kenan, Jr.,…
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The Founders’ Constitution – Vol 1
by Philip B. Kurland and Ralph Lerner
/ Learn MoreThe documentary sources and inspirations of The Founders’ Constitution reach to the early seventeenth century and extend through those Amendments to the Constitution that were adopted by 1835. In cooperation with the University of Chicago Press, Liberty Fund has prepared a new online edition of the entire work at: http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/ Philip B. Kurland was the William R. Kenan, Jr.,…
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The Founders’ Constitution – Vol 2
by Philip B. Kurland and Ralph Lerner
/ Learn MoreThe documentary sources and inspirations of The Founders’ Constitution reach to the early seventeenth century and extend through those Amendments to the Constitution that were adopted by 1835. In cooperation with the University of Chicago Press, Liberty Fund has prepared a new online edition of the entire work at: http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/ Philip B. Kurland was the William R. Kenan, Jr.,…
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Friends of the Constitution
by Colleen A. Sheehan and Gary L. McDowell
/ Learn MoreThere were many writers other than John Jay, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton who, in 1787 and 1788, argued for the Constitution’s ratification. In a collection central to our understanding of the American founding, Friends of the Constitution brings together forty-nine of the most important of these “other” Federalists’ writings. Colleen A. Sheehan is Professor of Political Science at Villanova…
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George Washington
by George Washington
/ Learn MoreGeorge Washington speaks for himself on behalf of liberty and the emerging American republic in this handsome book, the only one-volume compilation in print of his vast writings. While Washington is recognized as a military leader and the great symbolic figure of the early republic, many fail to appreciate the full measure of his contributions to the country. In these…
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