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In this work William Henry Chamberlin offers his perspective as a seasoned journalist on the United States’ involvement in World War II. Written only five years after the unconditional surrenders of Germany and Japan, the book is a window into its time.

William Henry Chamberlin (1897–1969) was an American journalist best known for his writings on the Cold War, Communism, and U.S. foreign policy.

The Revolutionary Writings of John Adams presents the principal shorter writings in which Adams addresses the prospect of revolution and the form of government proper to the new United States.

This collection illustrates that it was Adams who, before the Revolution, wrote some of the most important documents on the nature of the British Constitution and the meaning of rights, sovereignty, representation, and obligation.

C. Bradley Thompson is Professor of Political Science at Clemson University and the Executive Director of the Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism. He is the author of John Adams and the Spirit of Liberty.

Liberty and Order is an ambitious anthology of primary source writings: letters, circulars, debate transcriptions, House proceedings, and newspaper articles that document the years during which America’s Founding generation divided over the sort of country the United States was to become.

With this significant collection, the reader receives a deeper understanding of the complex issues, struggles, and personalities that made up the first great party battle and that continue to shape our representative government today.

Lance Banning (1942–2006) was Professor of History at the University of Kentucky.

The debates between Daniel Webster of Massachusetts and Robert Hayne of South Carolina gave fateful utterance to the differing understandings of the nature of the American Union that had come to predominate in the North and the South by 1830.

To Webster, the Union was the indivisible expression of one nation of people. To Hayne, the Union was the voluntary compact among sovereign states. The Webster-Hayne Debate consists of speeches delivered in the United States Senate in January of 1830.

Herman Belz is Professor of History at the University of Maryland.

In Democracy in America (1835) the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville interpreted American society through the lens of democratic political theory. A half-century later the Scotsman James Bryce examined “the institutions and the people of America as they are.” Bryce presented his findings in The American Commonwealth, first published in London in three volumes in 1888. This new Liberty Fund two-volume edition is based on the updated third edition of 1941, which encompassed all the changes, corrections, and additions that Bryce entered into the previous editions. Its expanded appendix includes Bryce’s 1887 essay, “The Predictions of Hamilton and De Tocqueville,” and contemporaneous (1889) reviews of The American Commonwealth by Woodrow Wilson and Lord Acton.

The great merit of Bryce’s work is that it is based on close observation of the actual operation of American political institutions, including political parties and municipal and state governments. Consequently, Bryce provides what Professor Gary McDowell describes as “a grand atlas of American politics and society.” Indeed, Bryce was able to discern enduring characteristics of American society and politics. Therefore, as Robert Nisbet has written, “we still go to Bryce for piquant and cogent answers to the questions of why great men are not chosen presidents and why the best men do not go into politics in America.”

James Bryce (1838–1922) was a British jurist, historian, and statesman. From 1907 to 1913 he was England’s ambassador to the United States.

Gary L. McDowell is the Tyler Haynes Interdisciplinary Professor of Leadership Studies, Political Science, and Law at the University of Richmond in Virginia. From 1992 to 2003 he was the Director of the Institute of United States Studies in the University of London.

In Defense of the Constitution argues that modern disciples of Progressivism who subtly distort fundamental principles of the Constitution are determined to centralize political control in Washington, D.C., to achieve their goal of an egalitarian national society. It is in their distrust of self-government and representative institutions that Progressivists advocate, albeit indirectly, an elitist regime based on the power of the Supreme Court—or judicial supremacy.

George W. Carey was Professor of Government at Georgetown University and editor of The Political Science Reviewer.

The Federalist, by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, constitutes a text central to the American political tradition. Written and published in newspapers in 1787 and 1788 to explain and promote ratification of the proposed Constitution for the United States, which were then bound by the Articles of Confederation, The Federalist remains of singular importance to students of liberty around the world.

George W. Carey was Professor of Government at Georgetown University and editor of The Political Science Reviewer.

James McClellan (1937–2005) was James Bryce Visiting Fellow in American Studies at the Institute of United States Studies, University of London.

In a landmark work, a leading scholar of the eighteenth century examines the ways in which an understanding of the nature of history influenced the thinking of the founding fathers.

As Jack P. Greene has observed, “[The Whig] conception saw the past as a continual struggle between liberty and virtue on one hand and arbitrary power and corruption on the other.” Many founders found in this intellectual tradition what Josiah Quincy, Jr., called the “true old English liberty,” and it was this Whig tradition—this conception of liberty—that the champions of American independence and crafters of the new republic sought to perpetuate. Colbourn supports his thesis—that “Independence was in large measure the product of the historical concepts of the men who made it”—by documenting what books were read most widely by the founding generation. He also cites diaries, personal correspondence, newspapers, and legislative records.

Trevor Colbourn is President Emeritus of the University of Central Florida.

Observations on “The Two Sons of Oil” was written in 1811 in response to the Reverend Samuel B. Wylie’s work, The Two Sons of Oil, which was published in 1803. In this work of radical Presbyterian theology, Wylie pointed out what he considered to be deficiencies in the constitutions of both Pennsylvania and the United States and declared them to be immoral.

Findley’s response to Wylie’s criticisms in Observations showed that it was neither the purpose nor the design of the United States government to have a federal religion and a federal creed. In a broader sense the book is also a passionate defense of a civil government guided by moral principles that allow for essential freedoms.

William Findley was born in Ireland and emigrated to Pennsylvania in 1763. He served in the Second through the Fifth Congresses, and again in the Eighth through the Fourteenth Congresses, earning the designation “Father of the House” before he retired from Congress in 1817. He died in 1821.

John Caldwell is retired from Augustana College, where he was Director of the Library and Professor of History. Himself a native of western Pennsylvania, Professor Caldwell is the author of George R. Stewart (1981) and William Findley from West of the Mountains: A Politician in Pennsylvania, 1783–1791 (2000).

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Many reference works offer compilations of critical documents covering individual liberty, local autonomy, constitutional order, and other issues that helped to shape the American political tradition. Yet few of these works are available in a form suitable for classroom use, and traditional textbooks give short shrift to these important issues.

The American Republic overcomes that knowleEAe gap by providing, in a single volume, critical, original documents revealing the character of American discourse on the nature and importance of local government, the purposes of federal union, and the role of religion and tradition in forming America’s drive for liberty.

By bringing together key original documents and other writings that explain cultural, religious, and historical concerns, this volume gives students, teachers, and general readers an effective way to begin examining the diversity of issues and influences that characterize American history.

The result unquestionably leads to a deeper and more thorough understanding of America’s political, institutional, and cultural continuity and change.

Bruce Frohnen is Associate Professor of Law at Ohio Northern University College of Law.

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The Origin and Principles of the American Revolution is perhaps one of the most important books written on the American Revolution by a European author. It is an original study of the subject by a conservative, objective German observer who acknowleEAes the legitimacy of the American Revolution, but also asserts at the same time that it was not a revolution but a legitimate transition.

The Liberty Fund edition is supplemented by a new introduction and annotations that provide the reader with historical and contextual background to better create a more robust picture of Gentz’s thought.

Peter Koslowski was Professor of Philosophy at VU University Amsterdam.

Alexander Hamilton, trusted military aide and secretary to General George Washington, wrote to persuade. He had the ability to clarify the complex issues of his time without oversimplifying them. From the basic core values established in his earlier writings to the more assertive vision of government in his mature work, we see how Hamilton’s thought responded to the emerging nation and how the nation was shaped by his ideas. This comprehensive collection of his early writings, from the period before and during the Revolutionary War, provides a fuller understanding of the development of his thinking.

Richard B. Vernier is Adjunct Professor of American History at Purdue University at Calumet.

Joyce Appleby is Professor Emerita of History at UCLA.

David Humphreys was aide-de-camp to Washington during the American Revolution. His Life of Israel Putnam, originally published in 1788, has rightly been described as “the first biography of an American written by an American.” It is, as William C. Dowling observes, “a classic of revolutionary writing, very readable and immensely interesting in what it says about the temper of the new republic in the period immediately after the American Revolution.” The subject—General Israel Putnam—is remembered to history and legend as exclaiming: “Don’t fire ’til you see the whites of their eyes!” to American soldiers at the Battle of Bunker Hill. As Professor Dowling notes, “All the episodes are retold—Bunker Hill, the Battle of White Plains, the crossing of the Delaware, the Battle of Princeton—but from the perspective of one who was there throughout, and who always permits us to see Putnam as the sort of character by whom history is, in the last analysis, made.” Humphreys wrote the biography when formation of the Society of the Cincinnati, composed of men who were officers in the Revolution, “focused debate in the new republic about the competing claims of individual liberty and the good of the community.”

William C. Dowling is a Professor of English at Rutgers University.

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This selection of essays, pamphlets, speeches, and letters to newspapers written between 1760 and 1805 by American political and religious leaders illuminate the founding of the republic. Many selections are obscure pieces that were previously available only in larger research libraries, but all illuminate the founding of the American republic and are essential reading for students and teachers of American political thought. The second volume includes an annotated bibliography of five hundred additional items for future reference.

The subjects covered in this rich assortment of primary material range from constitutionalism, representation, and republicanism to freedom of the press, religious liberty, and slavery.

Charles S. Hyneman was Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Indiana University before his death in 1984. He was a past president of the American Political Science Association.

Donald S. Lutz is Professor of Political Science at the University of Houston.

"Local government in colonial America was the seedbed of American constitutionalism." So begins the introductory essay to this landmark collection of eighty documents created by the American colonists—and not English officials—that are the genesis of American fundamental law and constitutionalism. Most of these documents, commencing with the Agreement of the Settlers at Exeter in New Hampshire, July 5, 1639, and concluding with Joseph Galloway''s Plan of Union, 1774—"the immediate precursor to the Articles of Confederation"—have never before been accessible to the general reader or available in a single volume. As Professor Lutz points out, the documents are chosen to make possible "a careful examination of [the American] people''s attempt at self-interpretation." All of the principal colonial documents are included, as are all documents attempting to unite the colonies, beginning with the New England Confederation of 1643. Bicameralism, popular sovereignty, the separation of powers, checks and balances, limited government, and religious freedom—in sum, the hallmarks of American constitutionalism—were first presented to the world in these writings.

Donald S. Lutz is Professor of Political Science at the University of Houston.

Used throughout the first half of the nineteenth century in schools and colleges, John Marshall’s own abriEAment of his monumental five-volume biography of George Washington is now available in a Liberty Fund edition that once again brings the spirit of George Washington alive in America’s classrooms.

Within eight years of the death of George Washington in 1799, John Marshall, who later became Chief Justice of the United States, published his authoritative five-volume biography. Justice Marshall’s biographer, Albert J. BeveriEAe, describes The Life of George Washington as “the fullest and most trustworthy treatment of that period from the conservative point of view.”

The twentieth and final version of Marshall’s abriEAement, published in 1849, is the text reproduced in the Liberty Fund edition of what Charles A. Beard has praised as a “great” and “masterly” biography.

The editors’ foreword and notes, with new maps of major battle campaigns, make this edition especially attractive for classroom use.

Robert Faulkner is Professor of Political Science at Boston College.

Paul Carrese is Associate Professor of Political Science at the United States Air Force Academy.

Two series of letters described as “the wellsprings of nearly all ensuing debate on the limits of governmental power in the United States” address the whole remarkable range of issues provoked by the crisis of British policies in North America out of which a new nation emerged from an overreaching empire.

Forrest McDonald is Professor Emeritus of American History at the University of Alabama and author of States’ Rights and the Union.

In one volume, Democracy, Liberty, and Property provides an overview of the state constitutional conventions held in the 1820s. With topics as relevant today as they were then, this collection of essential primary sources sheds light on many of the enduring issues of liberty. Emphasizing the connection between federalism and liberty, the debates that took place at these conventions show how questions of liberty were central to the formation of state government, allowing students and scholars to discover important insights into liberty and to develop a better understanding of U.S. history.

The debates excerpted in Democracy, Liberty, and Property focus on the conventions of Massachusetts, New York, and Virginia, and they include contributions from the principal statesmen of the founding era, including John Adams, James Madison, James Monroe, and John Marshall.

Merrill D. Peterson (1921–2009) was Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Virginia and a noted Jeffersonian scholar.

G. Alan Tarr is Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for State Constitutional Studies at Rutgers University–Camden.

David Ramsay’s History of the American Revolution appeared in 1789 during an enthusiastic celebration of nationhood. It is the first American national history written by an American revolutionary and printed in America.

Ramsay, a well-known Federalist, was an active participant in many of the events of the period and a member of the Continental Congress from South Carolina.

This is a comprehensive and exciting narrative of the events and ideas of the American Revolution (from the outbreak of turbulence in the 1760s to the onset of Washington’s administration) and an ardent Federalist defense of the Constitution of 1787.

This is the first modern edition of the work, based on the original and authorized 1789 version.

Lester H. Cohen taught history and American Studies at Purdue University.

The early political culture of the American republic was so deeply influenced by the religious consciousness of the New England preachers that it was often through the political sermon that the political rhetoric of the period was formed, refined, and transmitted. Political sermons such as the fifty-five collected in this work are unique to America, in both kind and significance. Political Sermons of the American Founding Era thus fills an important need if the American founding period is to be adequately understood.

Ellis Sandoz is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Eric Voegelin Institute at Louisiana State University.

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St. George Tucker’s View of the Constitution, published in 1803, was the first extended, systematic commentary on the United States Constitution after its ratification. Generations learned their Blackstone and their understanding of the Constitution through Tucker.

Clyde N. Wilson is Professor of History and editor of The Papers of John C. Calhoun at the University of South Carolina.

Mercy Otis Warren has been described as perhaps the most formidable female intellectual in eighteenth-century America. This work (in the first new edition since 1805) is an exciting and comprehensive study of the events of the American Revolution, from the Stamp Act Crisis of 1765 through the ratification of the Constitution in 1788–1789.

Steeped in the classical, republican tradition, Warren was a strong proponent of the American Revolution. She was also suspicious of the newly emerging commercial republic of the 1780s and hostile to the Constitution from an Anti-Federalist perspective, a position that gave her history some notoriety.

Lester H. Cohen taught history and American Studies at Purdue University.

George Washington speaks for himself on behalf of liberty and the emerging American republic in this handsome book, the only one-volume compilation in print of his vast writings.

While Washington is recognized as a military leader and the great symbolic figure of the early republic, many fail to appreciate the full measure of his contributions to the country. In these selections, his political ideas and juEAments stand out with remarkable clarity. His writings are replete with sustained, thoughtful commentary and keen political insight.

This volume includes correspondence, all of his presidential addresses, various public proclamations, his last will and testament, and the most comprehensive recompilation of the “discarded first inaugural” ever printed.

W. B. Allen is Professor of Political Philosophy and Director of the Program in Public Policy and Administration at Michigan State University.

In the turbulent years between passage of the Federal Reserve Act (1913) and the Bretton Woods Agreement (1945), the peoples of the Western world suffered two world wars, two major and several minor international financial panics, an epidemic of currency devaluations and debt repudiations, civil wars, and revolutions.

No period in history could serve better as a case study for the analysis of applied economic policy. No one could have been better situated to write that study than Benjamin M. Anderson. From his vantage point as economist for the Chase Manhattan Bank and editor of the Chase Economic Bulletin, who participated in much of what he records, Dr. Anderson here describes the climactic events of a turbulent era.

Benjamin M. Anderson (1886–1949) was a scholar, historian, banker, financier, and economist. After receiving his Ph.D. in economics, philosophy, and sociology from Columbia University in 1911, he taught economics at Harvard University. In 1918, he entered banking as Economic Advisor to the National Bank of Commerce in New York, and later became an economist for the Chase Manhattan Bank and editor of the Chase Economic Bulletin. He also served as President of the Economists’ National Committee on Monetary Policy.

Arthur Kemp was Professor Emeritus of Economics at Claremont McKenna College.

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The Man and the Statesman, the first volume in Liberty Fund’s six-volume series, may be considered the most complete edition of Bastiat’s works published to date, in any country, and in any language. The main source for this translation is the seven-volume Œuvres complètes de Frédéric Bastiat, published in the 1850s and 1860s.

The present volume, most of which has never before been translated into English, includes Bastiat’s complete correspondence: 207 letters Bastiat wrote between 1819, when he was only 18 years old, until just a few days before his untimely death in 1850 at the age of 49. For contemporary classical liberals, Bastiat’s correspondence will provide a unique window into a long-forgotten world where opposition to war and colonialism went hand-in-hand with support for free trade and deregulation.

Frédéric Bastiat (1801–1850) was one of the leading advocates of free markets and free trade in the mid-nineteenth century.

Jacques de Guenin is founder of the Cercle Frédéric Bastiat. He is a graduate of the École des Mines in Paris and holds a Master of Sciences from the University of California, Berkeley.

Dennis O’Keeffe is Professor of Social Science at the University of Buckingham, Buckingham, England, and is Senior Research Fellow in Education at the Institute of Economic Affairs, London.

David M. Hart has a Ph.D. in history from King’s College, CambriEAe, and is the Director of Liberty Fund’s Online Library of Liberty.

Adam Smith was an eloquent man of considerable philosophical and historical learning. His most incisive and enduring observations are collected here on subjects ranging from political and economic history to morals, art, education, war, and the American colonies. Throughout, notes an admirer in the introduction, “his writing is blessedly free of that use of jargon (and mathematics) that characterizes most of the modern materials in economics. His ideas are expressed in a lucid, straightforward manner that makes them accessible to all.”

William Leggett (1801–1839) was the intellectual leader of the laissez-faire wing of Jacksonian democracy. His diverse writings applied the principle of equal rights to liberty and property. These editorials maintain a historical and contemporary relevance.

Lawrence H. White is Professor of Economics at the University of Georgia.

In The Anti-capitalistic Mentality, the respected economist Ludwig von Mises plainly explains the causes of the irrational fear and hatred many intellectuals and others feel for capitalism. In five concise chapters, he traces the causation of the misunderstandings and resultant fears that cause resistance to economic development and social change. He enumerates and rebuts the economic arguments against and the psychological and social objections to economic freedom in the form of capitalism. Written during the heyday of twentieth-century socialism, this work provides the reader with lucid and compelling insights into human reactions to capitalism.

Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973) was the leading spokesman of the Austrian School of economics throughout most of the twentieth century.

Bettina Bien Greaves is a former resident scholar and trustee of the Foundation for Economic Education and was a senior staff member at FEE from 1951 to 1999.

Economic Policy contains six lectures Ludwig von Mises delivered in 1959 for the Centro de Estudios sobre la Libertad in Argentina. The lectures were posthumously edited by Mises’s wife, Margit, and George Koether, a student and long-time friend of Mises. This volume serves as an excellent introduction to what Mises sees as the simple truths of history in terms of economic principles. In straightforward language, Mises explains topics such as capitalism, socialism, interventionism, inflation, foreign investment, and economic policies and ideas.

Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973) was the leading spokesman of the Austrian School of economics throughout most of the twentieth century.

Bettina Bien Greaves is a former resident scholar and trustee of the Foundation for Economic Education and was a senior staff member at FEE from 1951 to 1999.