Founding Fathers and the Politics of Character
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A01=Andrew S. Trees
Activism
Admiration
Alien and Sedition Acts
Ambiguity
Ambivalence
Americans
Aristocracy
Articles of Confederation
Author_Andrew S. Trees
Benjamin Rush
Brigitta
Calculation
Category=NHK
Charles Cotesworth Pinckney
Commonplace book
Consideration
Continental Congress
Cowardice
Criticism
Defamation
Despotism
Disgust
Elbridge Gerry
Elite
Elitism
Embarrassment
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eq_history
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eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Etiquette
Genre
Government
Greatness
Hostility
Humiliation
Impossibility
John McPhee
Legislature
Mason Locke Weems
Mercy Otis Warren
Multitude
Newspaper
Open letter
Optimism
Pamphlet
Patriotism
Pessimism
Political alliance
Political culture
Political party
Politician
Politics
Popular sovereignty
Princeton University Press
Public administration
Publication
Ratification
Representative democracy
Republicanism
Revolution
Rhetoric
Sedition
Self-interest
Sensibility
Sincerity
Skepticism
Smithsonian Institution
Sovereignty
Suggestion
Superiority (short story)
The Other Hand
Treaty
Uncertainty
Wealth
Writing
Product details
- ISBN 9780691122366
- Weight: 340g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 09 Jan 2005
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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The American Revolution swept away old certainties and forced revolutionaries to consider what it meant to be American. Andrew Trees examines four attempts to answer the question of national identity that Americans faced in the wake of the Revolution. Through the writings of Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison, Trees explores a complicated political world in which boundaries between the personal and the political were fluid and ill-defined. Melding history and literary study, he shows how this unsettled landscape challenged and sometimes confounded the founders' attempts to forge their own--and the nation's--identity. Trees traces the intimately linked shaping of self and country by four men distrustful of politics and yet operating in an increasingly democratic world. Jefferson sought to recast the political along the lines of friendship, while Hamilton hoped that honor would provide a secure foundation for self and country. Adams struggled to create a nation virtuous enough to sustain a republican government, and Madison worked to establish a government based on justice.
Giving a new context to the founders' mission, Trees studies their contributions not simply as policy prescriptions but in terms of a more elusive and symbolic level of action. His work illuminates the tangled relationship among rhetoric, politics, self, and nation--as well as the larger question of national identity that remains with us today.
Andrew S. Trees has taught at the University of Virginia, Rhodes College, and Rutgers University, Newark. He currently lives in New York City and teaches at the Horace Mann School.
