Skip to main content

The History of the USA During the First Term of James Madison



I found this link to Henry Adams History of the United States of America During the First Term of James Madison.  It was too big for the title link.  Adams' books on Madison have been bound into a single volume by the Library of America.  I liked Wills discussion of this text in his book on Henry Adams, as Wills has a deep understanding of this tumultuous time in American History.  Madison and the US liked to think of itself as a major player, but as far as England and France were concerned, or for that matter Spain, the US was incidental to the events taking place in Europe.  Of course, the US would eventually get the last laugh.

Comments

  1. Thanks for this link, Gintaras. I'll use this and Wood until my book arrives. I made the mistake of ordering it with Game Change and it's currently out of stock (already). Must be quite the book!

    In Revolutionary Characters, Wood talks about the "Madison problem" -- which as I recall relates to how to reconcile his anti-democratic feelings towards the states.

    But sounds like Wills is dealing with more international questions, so I'll have to see what Adams says.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Wills definitely takes the broader view here, focusing heavily on the War of 1812, often to comic effect. Young America was lucky to have come out of that war in one piece.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...

Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

The Searchers

You are invited to join us in a discussion of  The Searchers , a new book on John Ford's boldest Western, which cast John Wayne against type as the vengeful Ethan Edwards who spends eight years tracking down a notorious Comanche warrior, who had killed his cousins and abducted a 9 year old girl.  The film has had its fair share of detractors as well as fans over the years, but is consistently ranked in most critics'  Top Ten Greatest Films . Glenn Frankel examines the origins of the story as well as the film itself, breaking his book down into four parts.  The first two parts deal with Cynthia Ann Parker and her son Quanah, perhaps the most famous of the 19th century abduction stories.  The short third part focuses on the author of the novel, Alan Le May, and how he came to write The Searchers. The final part is about Pappy and the Duke and the making of the film. Frankel noted that Le May researched 60+ abduction stories, fusing them together into a nar...