Jeffersonian Persuasion

The late Lance Banning was Professor of History at the University of Kentucky. His other books include The Sacred Fire of Liberty: James Madison and the Founding of the Federal Republic, also from Cornell, and Jefferson and Madison: Three Conversations from the Founding.

Banning writes in clear, readable fashion. His chapters are compact and lucid, his arguments crisply made. He knows the Jeffersonian literature of the 1790s and the country tradition upon which the Jeffersonians drew. Most importantly, he provides the kind of perspective that makes Jeffersonian argumentation understandable in its own terms. And in the process he tells some important things about the ways in which revolutionary ideology informed political behavior in the early republic.(Journal of American History)