The Treason Trial of Aaron Burr

Kent Newmyer received his PhD in history from the University of Nebraska in 1959. From 1960 to 1997, he taught American history at the University of Connecticut. Since 1997, he has been Professor of Law and History at the University of Connecticut School of Law. He has taught a wide range of graduate and undergraduate courses in American history, specializing in the political, constitutional and legal history of the early national period. He received two awards for teaching and in 1988 was named Distinguished Alumni Professor for excellence in teaching and scholarship, the highest faculty honor bestowed by the university. As an author, Newmyer is best known for Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story: Statesman of the Old Republic (1985) and, most recently, John Marshall and the Heroic Age of the Supreme Court (2001). A second edition of his short volume on the Supreme Court under Marshall and Taney was published in 2006. Newmyer's books have been reviewed in various history journals and law reviews, as well as in The New York Times, the Washington Post and the New Republic. Newmyer has appeared on C-Span's 'Booknotes', and most recently was a commentator in a National Public Television documentary on the US Supreme Court, produced by Channel 13 in New York City.

'The noted constitutional scholar R. Kent Newmyer's latest book illumines the ways 'law and politics were inseparably connected' in the 1807 treason trial of former vice president Aaron Burr, who was accused of attempting to take portions of the United States for his own … Throughout the book Newmyer writes with authority, both relying on the words of the participants and drawing on his obvious mastery of the secondary literature on these three larger than life personalities.' Ronald L. Hatzenbuehler, Journal of American History

• 1. Jefferson and Burr on the road to Richmond; 2. Jefferson and Marshall square off; 3. Legal theater in Richmond: Aaron Burr front and center; 4. Treason law for America: the lawyers grapple; 5. Judging the judge.