Since its founding in 1776, the United States has transformed as a country and a society. The University of Chicago Press has published books on nearly every phase of that national journey, from the colonial economy to modern arguments over liberalism.
“The University of Chicago Press is proud of its legacy of publishing books that deeply inform our understanding of America’s founding and the ideas that continue to shape our country,” said Garrett Kiely, director of the UChicago Press. “These publications are emblematic of our mission to provide a home for engaged, rigorous scholarship and books that can reach a wide audience of smart, curious readers.”
As the U.S. marks the 250th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, the Press has helped curate seven titles that examine the context of the country’s founding—and what it set in motion.
The State as a Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution
Eric Slauter
The founding of the United States after the American Revolution was so monumental in scope that the key actors considered this new government to be a work of art framed from natural rights. Recognizing the artificial nature of the state, these early politicians believed the culture of a people should inform the development of their governing rules and bodies. UChicago Assoc. Prof. Eric Slauter explores these central ideas in this extensive and novel account of the origins and meanings of the U.S. Constitution. Slauter uncovers the hidden cultural histories upon which the document rests, highlights the voices of ordinary people, and considers how the artifice of the state was challenged in its effort to sustain inalienable natural rights alongside slavery.
The Daily Thomas Paine: A Year of Common-Sense Quotes for a Nonsensical Age
Thomas Paine; edited with a foreword by Edward G. Gray
Paine was the spark that ignited the American Revolution. More than just a founding father, he was a verbal bomb-thrower, a rationalist and a rebel. In his influential pamphlets Common Sense and The American Crisis, Paine codified both colonial outrage and the intellectual justification for independence, arguing consistently and convincingly for Enlightenment values and the power of the people. The Daily Thomas Paine offers a year’s worth of pithy and provocative quotes from this quintessentially American figure.
Ties That Bound: Founding First Ladies and Slaves
Marie Jenkins Schwartz
In the households of the founding fathers from Virginia, slaves worked and suffered throughout the domestic environments of the era. American icons such as Martha Washington, Martha Jefferson and Dolley Madison were all slaveholders. And as Schwartz uncovers in Ties That Bound, these women, as the day-to-day managers of their households, dealt with the realities of a slaveholding culture directly and continually. Unlike other histories that treat the stories of the first ladies’ slaves as separate from the lives of their mistresses, Ties That Bound closely examines the relationships that developed between the first ladies and their slaves.
Accidental Pluralism: America and the Religious Politics of English Expansion, 1497-1662
Evan Haefeli
The U.S. has long been defined by its religious diversity and recurrent public debates over the religious and political values that define it. In Accidental Pluralism, Haefeli argues that America did not begin as a religiously diverse and tolerant society. It became so only because England’s religious unity collapsed just as America was being colonized. By tying the emergence of American religious toleration to global events, Haefeli creates a true transnationalist history that links developing American realities to political and social conflicts and resolutions in Europe, showing how the relationships among states, churches and publics were contested from the beginning of the colonial era and produced a society that no one had anticipated.
Trading Spaces: The Colonial Marketplace and the Foundations of American Capitalism
Emma Hart
While the exchange of goods was historically tied to a particular place, capitalism has gradually eroded this connection to create our current global trading systems. In Trading Spaces, Hart argues that Britain’s colonization of North America was a key moment in the market’s shift from place to idea, with major consequences for the character of the American economy. Hart’s book takes in the shops, auction sites, wharves, taverns, fairs and homes of 17th- and 18th-century America—places where new mechanisms and conventions of trade arose as Europeans re-created or adapted continental methods to new surroundings. This is the history of the trading spaces themselves: the physical sites in which the grubby work of commerce occurred and where the market itself was born.
Liberty’s Grid: A Founding Father, a Mathematical Dreamland, and the Shaping of America
Amir Alexander
In 1784, Thomas Jefferson presented Congress with an audacious scheme to reshape the territory of the young U.S. All western lands, he proposed, would be inscribed with a single rectilinear grid, transforming the natural landscape into a mathematical one.
Liberty’s Grid tells the story of the battle between grid makers and their opponents. When Congress endorsed Jefferson’s plan, it set off a struggle over American space that has not subsided. Today, the ideas Jefferson associated with the grid still echo through political rhetoric about the country’s founding, and competing visions for the nation are visible from Manhattan avenues and Kansan pastures to Yosemite’s cliffs and suburbia’s cul-de-sacs.
Equality of Permission: The Politics of Feasible Liberalism
Deirdre McCloskey
The revered public intellectual makes an essential argument for the political preconditions of a liberal society. She argues the case for liberalism as our best hope, and provides an essential vision of the political conditions necessary for its survival.
McCloskey prescribes a liberalism built around liberty from the bottom up: “equality before the law and equality of political and economic permissions,” lightly administered. The state, she argues, is increasingly the source of our discontents—an illiberal institution, hindered by a quixotic fixation on pursuing equality of wealth or opportunity. McCloskey shows that statism in pursuit of a chimerical general will, even when well-intentioned, leads to tyranny.
—Book descriptions adapted from the University of Chicago Press.