Reading Between the Lines

Contention and Dissent at the Founding of the Republic

Four conversations exploring the period following the Revolution when our country's founders helped to forge enduring democratic traditions, notions of constitutional authority and a new political culture. Each session centers on a book selected by Shane Butterfield, a graduate student in the History Department of the University of Rochester.

	The series opens with a discussion of Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation, Joseph Ellis' Pulitzer Prize-winning book that brings alive the bitter conflicts that threatened the new nation in the 1790s.
	This session focuses on Novus Ordo Seclorum: The Intellectual origins of the Constitution by Forrest McDonald, which reconstructs the founders' understanding of law, history, political philosophy, and political economy and explores how it was brought to bear in buildnigs a "new order of the ages."
	A discussion of The Other Founders: Anti-Federalism and the Dissenting Tradition in America, 1788-1828 by historian Saul Cornell, which examines the views of early political dissenters and shows their enduring influence in American political life.
	The series concludes with a conversation about What Kind of Nation? Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall and the Epic Struggle to Create a United States, James Simon's illuminating treatment of the clash of these two important figures over the direction of American governance.