Jan Ellen Lewis Historian and Writer

Abstract

The essays in this volume show Jan Ellen Lewis at the height of her powers as a writer and a historian. She was a historian of the period she studied, not a specialist in the history of gender, or emotions, or political culture and practice, or the Constitution. She listened carefully and sympathetically to her subjects, weaving fragmentary evidence into the stories they told—or sometimes, more revealingly, could not or would not tell about themselves. Lewis’s treatment of Thomas Jefferson, and his relations with his family, best exemplifies her approach. The essays collected here offers an elegant—and eloquent—introduction to the history of the early American Republic. Whether writing about the histories of gender and emotion in early American history, or about the status of women under the Constitution’s Three-Fifths Clause, or about Jefferson and his family, or about Sally Hemings, Jan Ellen Lewis enables readers to grasp what it must have been like to be alive at the beginning of the new nation’s history.