All Posts By

Kevin R.C. Gutzman

Review Posts

Ode to Father Abraham

A review of Lincoln (Simon and Schuster, 1995) by David Herbert Donald Professor David Herbert Donald of Harvard University, a son of Mississippi and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, is one of the most prominent historians of the late twentieth century. His biography of Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts—probably the most sanctimonious politician in American history— earned that statesman the label…
Kevin R.C. Gutzman
October 8, 2019
Review Posts

Peter Onuf’s Jefferson

A review of Jefferson and the Virginians: Democracy, Constitutions, and Empire (LSU Press, 2018) by Peter Onuf Historian Peter S. Onuf first saw the light as a Connecticut Yankee. Powerful of intellect even in his teens, he met the American Revolution as the subject of serious study in a Johns Hopkins graduate seminar (in which he was the sole undergraduate)…
Kevin R.C. Gutzman
February 26, 2019
Review Posts

The Constitutional Thought of Thomas Jefferson

A review of The Constitutional Thought of Thomas Jefferson by David N. Mayer (University of Virginia Press, 1994). Thomas Jefferson’s reputation is that of a great thinker. He is popularly (and I believe wrongly, but that is a different matter) believed to have been the greatest thinker among American’s Revolutionaries. It is as a writer and as an unofficial pontifex…
Kevin R.C. Gutzman
September 4, 2018
Review Posts

Shredding the Constitution to Save the Union

A review of Liberty & Union: The Civil War Era and American Constitutionalism by Timothy S. Huebner (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2016). Timothy S. Huebner’s new synthetic account of the Civil War and Reconstruction melds military history, political history, constitutional history, and black history in telling the tale of the most popular subject in American history. Published by one…
Kevin R.C. Gutzman
October 24, 2017