Washington not only fit the bill physically, he was also almost perfect psychologically, so comfortable with his superiority that he felt no need to explain himself. {As a young man during the French...

Contemporaries of Alexander Hamilton noticed his conspicuous sense of self-possession, his unique combination of serenity and energy.

In fact, the past is not history, but a much vaster region of the dead, gone, unknowable, or forgotten. History is what we choose to remember, and we have no alternative but to do our choosing now.

The strategic center of the rebellion was not a place – not New York, Philadelphia, not the Hudson corridor – but the Continental Army itself.

All well and good, but for our purposes these otherwise-valuable insights are mere subplots almost designed to carry us down side trails while blithely humming a tune about the rough equivalence of...

But if insecurity was the primal source of Hamilton's incredibly energy, one would have to conclude that providence had conspired to produce at the most opportune moment perhaps the most creative...

Upon learning that Washington intended to reject the mantle of emperor, no less an authority than George III allegedly observed, If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world. True to his...

in time to come be shaped by the human mind." Asked"

Antislavery idealists might prefer to live in some better world, which like all such places was too good to be true. The American nation in 1790, however, was a real world, laden with legacies like...

The old adage applied: if God were in the details, Colonel Washington would have been there to greet him upon arrival.

In addition, the most reliable and recent studies of African tribal culture demonstrated that slavery was a long-standing custom among the Africans themselves, so enslaved Africans in America were...

It took him {Washington} more than a year to gain control over his own aggressive instincts.

permitting the continuance and expansion of slavery as the price to pay for nationhood. This decision meant that tragedy was also built into the American founding, and the only question we can ask is...

In a very real sense, we are complicitous in their achievement, since we are the audience for which they were performing; knowing we would be watching helped to keep them on their best behavior.

Like the classic it has become, the Farewell Address has demonstrated the capacity to assume different shapes in different eras, to change color, if you will, in varying shades of light.

I am not a Federalist," he declared in 1789, "because I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever.… If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I...

For Madison, on the other hand, a Public Debt is a Public curse, and in a Representative Government greater than in any other.26

The first symptom of the trouble appeared when Madison studied Hamilton's proposal for the funding of the domestic debt. On the one hand, Hamilton's recommendation looked straightforward: All citizens...