Early American Research Articles

Rival Visions: How the Views of Jefferson and His Contemporaries Defined the Early American Republic ed. by Dustin A. Gish and Andrew Bibby

Rival Visions: How the Views of Jefferson and His Contemporaries Defined the Early American Republic ed. by Dustin A. Gish and Andrew Bibby

:Assembled for Use: Indigenous Compilation and the Archives of Early Native American Literatures

:<i>Assembled for Use: Indigenous Compilation and the Archives of Early Native American Literatures</i>

Family, Slavery, and Love in the Early American Republic: The Essays of Jan Ellen Lewis ed. by Barry Bienstock, Annette Gordon-Reed, and Peter S. Onuf

Reviewed by: Family, Slavery, and Love in the Early American Republic: The Essays of Jan Ellen Lewis ed. by Barry Bienstock, Annette Gordon-Reed, and Peter S. Onuf Cassandra Good Family, Slavery, and Love in the Early American Republic: The Essays of Jan Ellen Lewis. Edited by Barry Bienstock, Annette Gordon-Reed, and Peter S. Onuf. (Williamsburg, Va.: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture; and Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. [viii], 422. $39.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-6563-4.) Open the acknowledgments section of nearly any book on gender and sexuality (and plenty more on politics) in the early American republic published during the past several decades, and Jan Lewis's name will appear. Lewis had an outsize influence on these fields through both her mentorship and her published writings. This volume does a great service in compiling and contextualizing thirteen of her previously published articles, many of which were scattered across different edited volumes. Reading Lewis's articles together shows both the coherence of and the evolution in her thinking over the course of nearly forty years. Lewis's work was often ahead of its time, engaging early on with the gender and cultural turns as well as with new approaches to the study of emotional history. The book begins with a short introduction by Lewis's close friends and fellow Jefferson scholars Peter S. Onuf and Annette Gordon-Reed, followed by four thematic sections. It closes with an acknowledgments section by Lewis's husband, Barry Bienstock, that sheds light on his late wife's relationships with various scholars in the field. The volume came together as a tribute to Lewis and a legacy for her granddaughters after her death in 2018, at a time when Lewis was still actively producing important scholarship. The first section, "Gender in the Early American Republic," is introduced by Carolyn Eastman and demonstrates Lewis's interest in exploring the political roles women played during this period. While Lewis's article "The Republican Wife: Virtue and Seduction in the Early Republic" is well known, her articles on women's pervasive political presence in early national Washington, D.C., and the brief period of women's suffrage in New Jersey between 1776 and 1807 are equally important. Her extended engagement with Jürgen Habermas is somewhat an artifact of its time, but all three articles are key parts of a conversation that more often features Linda K. Kerber, Catherine Allgor, and Rosemarie Zagarri. Nicole Eustace introduces the section on emotional history, rightly noting that Lewis's work anticipated a field that has flourished in recent years. The section's first article, "Domestic Tranquillity and the Management of Emotion among the Gentry of Pre-Revolutionary Virginia," largely echoes the first chapter of Lewis's book The Pursuit of Happiness: Family and Values in Jefferson's Virginia (New York, 1983). In a piece titled "Mother's Love: The Construction of an Emotion in Nineteenth-Century America," Lewis explores what she calls "emotionology of motherhood" in the antebellum era, fusing ideas about religion, gender, and emotion (p. 144). The final article, featuring Angelica Schuyler Church, Alexander Hamilton, and Thomas Jefferson, focuses on the intersection of politics and emotion. Lewis also brought her interest in the politics of the early republic to her work on the Constitution. As David Waldstreicher notes in the third section's introduction, Lewis convincingly demonstrated the central importance of [End Page 760] gender and slavery in Revolutionary and constitutional thought (p. 175). All three articles in this section demonstrate Lewis's rigorous attention to language and logic, clearly elucidating the ways women and enslaved people served as props in larger debates about representation, citizenship, and sectionalism. In the final section, introduced by Onuf and Gordon-Reed, Lewis applies her understanding of gender, family, politics, and slavery to Thomas Jefferson. All four of these articles come from edited volumes and may not be well known to readers, but the standout of the group, "White Jeffersons," deserves attention. First published in 1999, the essay offers an impressionistic, sometimes almost elegiac reflection on what Jefferson's relationship with Sally Hemings (which was, at the time, newly proved) meant for Jefferson...

CONSTRUCTIONS OF NORTH AFRICAN CORSAIRS IN EARLY AND POST-9/11 AMERICAN ORIENTALIST DISCOURSE

The capture and enslavement of American sailors at the hands of North African corsairs, notoriously known as Barbary pirates, on the Mediterranean coasts in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, coupled with the so-called Barbary Wars between the newly-independent United States and the-then branded the Barbary States of North Africa, gave rise to the “the first significant group of U.S. Orientalist works” (Schueller 45). Following the tragic events of September 11 and the ensuing “War on Terror”, many of the negative images perpetuated in these early American Orientalist writings have been revived in post-9/11 American historiography and media accounts of Barbary Wars which both advocate that the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century North African corsairs were the first “Islamic terrorists” whom the United States had ever faced. Scholarship on early American Orientalism has demonstrated how representations of the early North African ‘Mahometan’ as despotic, antichristian, and decadent were employed to shape American national identity. Yet, little, if no, scholarly attention has been paid to how both early and post-9/11 American writings on Barbary North Africa have invested in stereotypical depictions of barbarism, savagery, monstrosity, cannibalism, demonization, and, more recently, terrorism and Jihadism to create the misguided and mistaken cultural assumption that monstrosity and violence are inherent qualities of Muslims and Arabs. In tracing and identifying these misassumptions, this article endeavors to prove that the stereotyping of Muslims and Arabs was has been a prevalent phenomenon in American culture. It, too, seeks to unveil how Americans, both in early America and the post-9/11 era, have tried, through narrative, to appropriate and construct and reconstruct the North African ‘Mahometans’, and Muslims and Arabs in general, as the inhumane monster and the arch-enemy who should be fought wherever s/he is found.&lt;p&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt; Article visualizations:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src="/-counters-/edu_01/0594/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

Family, Slavery, and Love in the Early American Republic: The Essays of Jan Ellen Lewis ed. by Barry Bienstock, Annette Gordon-Reed, and Peter S. Onuf

Reviewed by: Family, Slavery, and Love in the Early American Republic: The Essays of Jan Ellen Lewis ed. by Barry Bienstock, Annette Gordon-Reed, and Peter S. Onuf Nancy Isenberg Family, Slavery, and Love in the Early American Republic: The Essays of Jan Ellen Lewis. Edited by Barry Bienstock, Annette Gordon-Reed, and Peter S. Onuf, with contributions by Carolyn Eastman, Nicole Eustace, and David Waldstreicher. Williamsburg, Va., and Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. 432 pages. Cloth, ebook. The late leading scholar of the early republic Jan Ellen Lewis was one of those rare historians who was not afraid to explore new areas of research. Her interests were broad, extending to women’s history, constitutional questions involving race and gender, the history of emotions, and the cultural meaning of republicanism. Though her career began in the field of Thomas Jefferson studies, she took an unorthodox stance and refused to depict him as an iconic Renaissance man in the way many historians did. Rather, she explored his emotionally wrought family relations and his traumas and dramas within the domestic sphere. Impressively, Lewis showed how Jefferson’s domestic idiom traveled outside the home, shaping the political, social, and legal thought that lay at the heart of heroic treatments of him. At the same time, although she did not paper over his complicity with slavery and his blindness and privilege as a wellborn first son at home among his peers in Virginia’s gentry class, she also avoided the reductionist pose of turning Jefferson into a modern-day villain. Anyone who reads the new collection of her essays, Family, Slavery, and Love in the Early American Republic, will discover her to have been a gifted writer and a sharp thinker on Jefferson and his times. Jefferson has long been the most provocative and problematic founder. Because he wrote with feeling and best expressed the nation’s ideals, many Americans have developed an almost personal relationship with him and feel a compelling need to know him beyond his words. Yet for many he is elusive, baffling, and self-protective. He presented his political enemies—whether British or American—as unscrupulous, vile characters, which explains why popular writers, journalists, and historians have often found themselves forced to declare their allegiance: Are you on Jefferson’s side or not? Lewis’s scholarship cut through the emotional morass that engulfs Jefferson’s legacy. In tackling Jefferson, Lewis made it clear that she never wanted to compose a biography. As literary critics have observed, biography presents the danger of assuming a coherent self and imputing logical explanations for behavior rather than accepting each individual life as a bundle of [End Page 630] contradictions.1 Lewis’s historical gift lay in ferreting out dubious rationalizations and logical inconsistencies. In one powerful essay, “The White Jeffersons” (1999), she showed that Jefferson, a loving father and grandfather, conditioned his white family so that they would still lie for him long after his death, inventing cover stories to mask the truth about his relationship with Sally Hemings. In excruciating detail in “The Blessings of Domestic Society” (1993), she reveals Jefferson’s suffocating “never-ceasing love” (310) for his white daughters. Within the family fold, happiness bore psychological costs.2 Lewis’s scholarship helped shape a version of cultural history influenced by literary and linguistic analysis, post-structuralism, feminist theory, new historicism, and anthropology. She directed this approach to examining whether the early republic, for all its revolutionary inheritance, transformed the system of patriarchy it had inherited from the British. What she found might be called “republican double-talk,” with double-talk defined as that which “appears to be earnest . . . but is in fact a mixture of sense and nonsense.”3 The ideology of the Enlightenment and republicanism made Americans at once optimistic and deeply suspicious of their fellow citizens, forcing them to contort their lofty abstract principles—and nowhere more acutely than in gender relations. If government relied on the will of the people, as most in the early republic accepted, citizens needed to be...

Standard-Bearers of Equality: America’s First Abolition Movement

Standard-Bearers of Equality: America’s First Abolition Movement

Betsy Klimasmith. Urban Rehearsals and Novel Plots in the Early American City

<scp>Betsy Klimasmith</scp>. <i>Urban Rehearsals and Novel Plots in the Early American City</i>

A New Jerusalem: Flavius Josephus in Early America

This article argues that the first-century Jewish historian, Titus Flavius Josephus, was of central importance to early American Protestants as they wrestled with how to construct a divinely upheld polity and with who would be included within it. By tracing the prefaces to the many editions of Josephus that were published in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it becomes clear that many Protestant readers in America felt torn between two competing identities: Rome and Israel. Scholars of early America are familiar with both labels. But as many early Americans knew from Josephus, those images were not always complementary. In fact, as they pondered over the account of the decimation of the first Jerusalem at the hands of Rome, it became clear that there might be something antithetical in those ancient models. This article argues that Josephus's histories enabled Americans to hold together the tensions in their national identity and ancient imagination that envisioned the United States as both a new Rome and a New Jerusalem. As a foundation, Josephus breathed life and legitimacy into the developing American culture. By neglecting to account for Josephus in this era, scholars have overlooked one of the most pervasive stories that formed the character and understanding of American Protestantism.

Biography and Bernard Bailyn: The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson and the “Logical Obligation” of Historical Research

Biography and Bernard Bailyn: <i>The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson</i> and the “Logical Obligation” of Historical Research

Stranger Citizens: Migrant Influence and National Power in the Early American Republic by John McNelis O'Keefe

Stranger Citizens: Migrant Influence and National Power in the Early American Republic by John McNelis O'Keefe

Pragmatism, Logic, and Law

Pragmatism, Logic, and Law

Founding Authority: Authority, the Authoritative, and John Marshall's McCulloch

Abstract Lacking the powers of the “purse or the sword,” the U.S. Supreme Court is particularly dependent upon maintaining “authority” in order to ensure recognition of its constitutional rulings. Such authority allows the Court to operate against the majority and to survive as a political institution despite lacking a basis in popular will. In one understanding of the Court's position, that authority sits outside of politics, and calls upon a pre-existing and accepted relationship in order to navigate the absence of power and force. Linking authority to a pre-existing relationship and a non-political role, the Supreme Court can be seen as countermajoritarian by design. Calling on an authority which sits outside of political life, by necessity it lacks attachment to the political majority of any given era, and instead binds the nation to a constitution which sits above and beyond politics. However a second approach to authority emphasizes not a relationship to a past moment or pre-political relationship but rather the collective recognition of authority. This view of authority looks to Flathman's conception of “the authoritative,” defined in terms of “the web of conventions” that link power and authority, to situate authority within the current moment. Examining a central moment within the development of the U.S. Supreme Court's authority, the case of McCulloch vs. Maryland, this article argues that it is the second view of authority that most readily captures the authority of the Court. Through a close reading of Chief Justice John Marshall's opinion in McCulloch vs. Maryland, the article shows that while appeals to a founding moment were important within that opinion, these appeals can be productively understood as reflective of the authoritative ethos of the early American Republic. Framed in this manner, the opinion sought to generate authority not by a link to the past but through connection to a contingent sense of the authoritative. Crucially, such an approach positions constitutional authority within the contemporary political realm and offers the possibility of a constitutional politics less anchored in a particular historical moment of founding.

The settlers’ fortunes: Comparing tax censuses in the Cape Colony and early American republic

AbstractEuropeans at the end of the eighteenth century had settled across the globe, from North and South America to Australia to the southern tip of Africa. While theories of institutional persistence explain the ‘reversal of fortunes’ between settled and unsettled regions, few studies consider the large differences in early living standards between settler societies. This paper uses newly transcribed household‐level tax censuses from the Dutch and British Cape Colony and the United States shortly after independence to show comparative levels of income and wealth over four decades both between the two regions and within them. Cape farmers were, on average, more affluent than their American counterparts. While crop output and livestock were more unequally distributed at the Cape, ownership of enslaved people in America was more unequal. There was little indication of an imminent reversal of fortunes.

Allison Margaret Bigelow. Mining Language. Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and Colonial Metallurgy in the Early Modern Iberian World. Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg (VA) 2020. xix, 354 pp. Ill. Maps. $39.95. (E-book: $29.99.)

Allison Margaret Bigelow. Mining Language. Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and Colonial Metallurgy in the Early Modern Iberian World. Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg (VA) 2020. xix, 354 pp. Ill. Maps. 29.99.) - Volume 67 Issue 2

Cords of Affection: Constructing Constitutional Union in Early American History, by Emily Pears

<i>Cords of Affection: Constructing Constitutional Union in Early American History</i>, by Emily Pears

Underwriters of the United States: How Insurance Shaped the American Founding by Hannah Farber

Reviewed by: Underwriters of the United States: How Insurance Shaped the American Founding by Hannah Farber Jessica M. Lepler Underwriters of the United States: How Insurance Shaped the American Founding. By Hannah Farber. Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. Williamsburg, Va., and Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. 349 pages. Cloth, ebook. If you insure an early American mercantile voyage, make sure to stow some cats on the boat; legend suggests you may need to literally put your "Catts in a bag" (246 n. 9) as evidence that you took the customary feline precaution against rats.1 You will not find this term in your insurance policy, but you will be expected to know it as part of the lex mercatoria—the purportedly universal, unchanging, and unspoken "laws of merchants" (19) that governed trade and maritime risk in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. You, dear reader, will need this tip because, in Hannah Farber's Underwriters of the United States, "you" are a character. This powerful new book about the hidden role of marine insurance in the establishment of the United States begins with a prologue written in the second person that explains how you—in the shape of a fictional, wealthy, white, male, married, Bostonian shipowner of 1800—manage the risk of a round trip to the Caribbean. Sailing the seas during the first half century of U.S. national history meant navigating a world at near-constant war. To insure against wartime spoilation—when a combatant illegally seized neutral ships and cargo—as well as more predictable damage (like that caused by rats), merchants pooled the risk of their community's voyages, gathered information, and signed contracts securing each other's assets. The process could be called "underwriting" (13), a term that also meant supporting an undertaking. The people and companies who underwrote the seafaring risk of American merchants—a group Farber describes as "marine insurers" (13)—are the subject of Farber's study. Despite a few intriguing case studies of famous (or infamous) insurers such as the revolutionary "financier" (14) Robert Morris or the scandal-prone Jacob Barker and his associates, however, this is not really a history of individuals or their companies.2 Farber's book, in her terms, is [End Page 467] about "a practice, not a class" (22), and prioritizes questions of "how" over "why" or "who." The practice that most interests Farber includes the range of techniques insurers used to engage in an unusual kind of "regulatory capture" (22) in which the industry predated the polity. For centuries, insurers acted within, beyond, and around the laws of countries to enforce the lex mercatoria's control over maritime trade. In the Age of Revolutions, when the sovereignty and stability of states were up in the air, the governmental role of insurers became especially apparent because insurers' governance of the seas was often more solid than the laws of the land. Shifting their practices to accommodate changing contexts, insurers employed the tools of their trade "opportunistically" (21) to assist in ushering the new United States into existence and solidifying its sovereignty. Accordingly, Farber describes the development of both the U.S. maritime insurance industry and the nation state as a "process of coformation" (22). Farber couples this big-picture analysis of "state making" (21) with the investigation of the everyday practices that constituted the early American insurance business. For example, she considers how insurers "wielded numerical calculations as weapons" (24). The mere suggestion that insurers' rates were based on complicated mathematics could convince customers and concerned citizens not "to question their decisions" (25). Appearing to be objectively actuarial, insurers could hide profit motives and political interests behind their seemingly mundane practices of quantification. This kind of everyday insurance practice is immediately foregrounded by Farber's second-person prologue. These first eleven pages also establish the purpose of the book for two different sets of readers of early American financial history. For one, the prologue explains the complex maritime insurance industry in a format accessible enough to be assigned to undergraduates. Meanwhile, for those immersed in the field, the book's opening section positions Underwriters of...

Spaces of Enslavement: A History of Slavery and Resistance in Dutch New York by Andrea C. Mosterman

Reviewed by: Spaces of Enslavement: A History of Slavery and Resistance in Dutch New York by Andrea C. Mosterman Christy Clark-Pujara Spaces of Enslavement: A History of Slavery and Resistance in Dutch New York. By Andrea C. Mosterman. New Netherland Institute. 246 pages. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2021. Cloth, ebook. Andrea C. Mosterman's Spaces of Enslavement examines the experiences of enslaved people in Dutch New York using historical spatial analysis, offering an in-depth study of the often-overlooked spaces where enslaved people lived and labored. Her thorough examinations of the physical places occupied by bound people demonstrate the necessity of seriously considering space and the built environment in slavery studies. As she effectively shows, the use of private and public space was contested through the institution of slavery. She pays particular attention to how the relationships between enslavers and the enslaved were articulated and mitigated through the occupation of and movement in and out of space, especially family homes, churches, and public areas. Mosterman thus demonstrates how Dutch American enslavers attempted to use the built environment to control and surveil enslaved people and how enslaved people resisted the restrictions and limits placed on their movements and occupation of various spaces. Spaces of Enslavement is a hyper-local study that begins with the Dutch invasion and occupation of Manhattan in the 1620s and concludes during the early American republic. The enslavers she studies were those Dutch colonists and later Dutch Americans who, even after the sale of New Netherland to the British, spoke Dutch and were members of the Dutch Reformed Church. The first generations of enslaved people were African-descended Atlantic Creoles—bound peoples primarily transported by privateers from the West Indies. Many of them were familiar with the commercial world of the Atlantic, semifluent in multiple languages, and intimately knowledgeable about multiple cultures. By contrast, in the eighteenth century, the enslaved were predominantly captives from Madagascar, the Gold Coast, and Senegambia who entered the region directly and whose experience of enslavement was marked by extreme disorientation. Through meticulous interrogation of archival materials—including account books, newspapers, and court and church records from the United States and the Netherlands—Mosterman paints an intimate picture of the lived experience of enslaved people in Dutch New Amsterdam and early Dutch America more broadly. She also employs the methods and theories of social scientists—particularly archaeologists—to describe the spaces where enslaved people lived, worked, socialized, and prayed. Her research included taking measurements to determine if they could stand upright in the spaces where they slept, deducing the intensity of heat in the summer and cold in [End Page 477] the winter, and assessing how much privacy they had to make love, change their clothes, and sleep. Similarly, when examining their religious lives, she focuses on questions such as whether they could see and hear the minister from their segregated seats in church. Mosterman's attention to detail is a concrete reminder of how much impact the built environment had on the day-to-day lived experience of enslaved people. Spaces of Enslavement is organized both chronologically and thematically. The first two chapters focus on the Dutch period, highlighting the importance of slave labor and how those held in bondage by the Dutch West India Company took advantage of the lack of spatial control to negotiate greater freedoms both formal and informal. Chapter 1 opens with the botched hanging of an enslaved man who was to be executed for the murder of another enslaved man; his life was spared when colonists pleaded with officials to reconsider executing him after the initial attempt failed. Mosterman uses this sensational event to highlight how instrumental the labors of enslaved people were to the maintenance of the colony, as enslaved people helped to build the colonial infrastructure and were armed during conflicts with Indigenous peoples. Chapter 2 begins with freedom petitions from three enslaved women. They asked the New Netherland council both to manumit them after decades of "loyal" (31) labor and to allow them to live together among other freed Black people north of New Amsterdam. The council agreed but required the women to return weekly for domestic work...

Religion and the American Revolution. An imperial history. By Katherine Carté. Pp. xxii + 394 incl. 20 ills. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press/Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2021. $49.95. 978 1 4696 6264 0

Religion and the American Revolution. An imperial history. By Katherine Carté. Pp. xxii + 394 incl. 20 ills. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press/Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2021. $49.95. 978 1 4696 6264 0 - Volume 73 Issue 3

The Man of the People: Political Dissent and the Making of the American Presidency

In this fascinating study of early American politics, Nathaniel C. Green uses the presidency as a lens through which to see the development of American national identity, the struggle to establish the authority of the American constitutional system, and the tensions between the emergence of partisan divisions and the desire for national unity. Green eschews the familiar stories about the early American presidency. He does not look at the office of the presidency from the perspective of its occupant. He avoids the momentous early constitutional debates over the scope of the powers of the presidency and the humdrum of presidential administration and policy making. The presidency being “made” in these pages is the presidency of the public imagination. How did people talk about the presidency, and those who aspired to exercise the powers of the presidency, in the early years of the republic? Through a wide-ranging but close examination of...

The Jewish World of Alexander Hamilton by Andrew Porwancher

Reviewed by: The Jewish World of Alexander Hamilton by Andrew Porwancher Stanley Mirvis Andrew Porwancher, The Jewish World of Alexander Hamilton (Princeton Univ. Press, 2021). Pp. 272; 19 b/w photos. $27.95 cloth. I regularly speak in public about colonial American Jewish communities. It has become almost an inevitability that someone asks me the question: "is it true that Hamilton was Jewish?" My initial reaction, admittedly elitist, was to be dismissive. Would someone be asking me this question if not for the popularity of Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton musical (which, in full disclosure, I have not seen)? I was aware that Hamilton was born and raised in the West Indies, and of a tradition that he had attended a Jewish school. But that was the full extent of my knowledge on the matter. Armed only with this sliver of information, I became increasingly puzzled by the question. How does one make the leap from Hamilton possibly having attended a Jewish school in Nevis—whatever that might have been—to becoming Jewish? My instinctual conclusion was that such a logic distortion could only be rooted in antisemitism. That is, as America's founding banker and first Secretary of the Treasury, Hamilton must have been a Jew. After all, nobody was trying to claim Jefferson, Madison, or Adams as Jewish. With this assumption I began to warn those asking the question about the potentially antisemitic overtones of what they were asking. After reading Andrew Porwancher's exciting new book The Jewish World of Alexander Hamilton, I now realize that there is much more to this question than I had previously assumed. I was astonished by how differently Porwancher approached the issue of Hamilton's Jewishness. Whereas for me, it was puzzling, even troubling, how much Jewishness people assigned to Hamilton, for Porwancher, the anti-Jewish bias rested in the extent to which previous Hamilton scholars had overlooked his Jewishness. Porwancher believes that generations of historians have been reluctant, even unwilling, to admit that there was a "Jewish"—so to speak—Founding Father. Porwancher has successfully made the case that there is much more substance to Hamilton's Jewishness than simplistic legends about his attendance at a Jewish school or antisemitic assumptions about Jewish predilections for finance. He makes an almost Freudian argument that Hamilton's exposure to Jews and Judaism in the Caribbean and especially his mother's likely affiliation with the Judaism of her first husband, was foundational in shaping the rest of his career. It was particularly informative for Hamilton's consistently favorable disposition toward Jews in debates over religious tolerance. Porwancher convincingly demonstrates that Hamilton was the strongest advocate for Jewish civil liberties and the most legitimately philosemitic of the Founding Fathers. The true value of the book, I believe, rests not in Porwancher's claim of Hamilton's own sense of Jewishness, the subject of the first two chapters, but rather in expertly situating Hamilton in the debates over religious tolerance. Hamilton is generally overlooked, compared to other Founding Fathers, in the historical discourse about the origins and ideologies of religious tolerance in America. For Porwancher, Hamilton's posture toward Jews is a powerful barometer of his dedication to true religious tolerance in the Early Republic. He demonstrates that, unlike every other Founding Father—except Washington—Hamilton was the only [End Page 578] one who didn't express some ambivalence about or even outright hostility toward Jews. Not only was Hamilton free of anti-Jewish stereotyping and bigotry, but he also maintained lifelong friendships and partnerships with Jews who were a crucial part of his New York law practice both before and after his government service. The Jewish World of Alexander Hamilton is an excellent Jewish communal history of the Early Republic, especially in New York City. Given their demographic paucity, Jews are often a footnote in studies of the early American experience. Jewish Studies, alternatively, sometimes treats Jews in isolation. Through the Hamiltonian lens, Porwancher has struck a good balance. He offers valuable profiles of well-known figures such as Haym Salomon and Gershom Mendes Seixas as well as lesser-known figures such as Isaac Moses and Moses Myers. His terrific discussion of state-constitutional...