Pursuits of Knowledge

In celebration of Civic Season at Monticello, join us for a conversation with bestselling historian and Pulitzer Prize finalist H.W. Brands on his book, Founding Partisans: Hamilton, Madison, Jefferson, Adams and the Brawling Birth of American Politics, a revelatory history on the shocking emergence of vicious political division at the birth of the United States.

To the framers of the Constitution, political parties were a fatal threat to republican virtues. They had suffered the consequences of partisan politics in Britain before the American Revolution, and they wanted nothing similar for America. Yet parties emerged even before the Constitution was ratified, and they took firmer root in the following decade. In Founding Partisans, Brands crafts a fresh and lively narrative of the early years of the republic as the Founding Fathers fought one another with competing visions of what our nation would be.