Allen C Guelzo

"This concise history delves into the constitutional, political, and social issues behind Reconstruction to provide a lucid and original account of a historical moment that left an indelible mark on American social fabric. [The author] depicts Reconstruction as a "bourgeois revolution"--As the attempted extension of the free-labor ideology embodied by Lincoln and the Republican Party to what was perceived as a Southern region gone awry from the Founders'...

"From the acclaimed author of Gettysburg: The Last Invasion--a sweeping, singularly immediate, and intimate biography of the Confederate general and his fateful decision to betray his nation in order to defend his home state and uphold the slave system he claimed to oppose"--

Americans pride themselves on being doers rather than thinkers, but ideas are at the very root of what it means to be an American. Behind this nation's diverse views on religion, education, social equality, democracy, and other vital issues is a long-running intellectual debate about the right ordering of the human, natural, and divine worlds. Indeed, America is an enduring hotbed of ideas. Such great thinkers as Jonathan Edwards, Thomas Jefferson,...

Five days after Abraham Lincoln was buried in Springfield, Illinois, John Locke Scripps, who had convinced Lincoln to write his first campaign autobiography, asserted that the 16th president had become, "the Great American Man - the grand central figure in American (perhaps the World's) History." Historians still find it hard to quibble with Scripps's opinion. Lincoln was the central figure in the nation's greatest crisis, the Civil War. His achievements...

The era known as Reconstruction is one of the unhappiest times in American history. It succeeded in reuniting the nation politically after the Civil War but in little else. Among its chief failures was the inability to chart a progressive course for race relations after the abolition of slavery and rise of Jim Crow. Reconstruction also struggled to successfully manage the Southern resistance towards a Northern, free-labor pattern. But the failures...

Could the American experiment succeed? George Washington, one of the most iconic Founders, had strong doubts. After explaining the importance of getting a well-rounded understanding of the Founders, Professor Guelzo explores Washington's fears about post-Revolutionary America and his concerns about how people could administer their own affairs.

Professor Guelzo takes you inside Alexander Hamilton's views about the American Republic: the fictions of hierarchy and aristocracy; the voluntary compact between rulers and ruled; the division of power into small packets; and his suspicions of the behavior of the Confederation Congress.

How was the location of the nation's new capital decided upon? How were the streets of Washington organized? What happened when Washington asked Congress for money? It all started, as you'll learn, with Benjamin Banneker's surveying mission of the iconic site on the eastern branch of the Anacostia River.

America and the Soviet Union disagreed over the future of eastern Europe. A temporary dividing line drawn through Europe became permanent. Soviet possession of nuclear weapons by 1949 created a geopolitical stalemate. The proliferation of nuclear weapons to a point of mutually assured destruction caused anxiety and an intense moral debate about their legitimacy inside the United States.