I take a personal interest in the Founders’ revival, since I helped start it. My first biography, Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington, was generously reviewed by a major scholar, Joseph J. Ellis, on the front page of the New York Times Book Review in February 1996.
That was a warm-up: The breakout book for the Founders was Ellis’s own American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (1997), which won the National Book Award. In its wake, professional historians (Edmund Morgan, Gordon Wood, Jack Rakove) and professional biographers (David McCullough, Ron Chernow) moved steadily through the great names: Franklin, Washington, Hamilton, John Adams, Madison. Lesser greats had their innings, from Sam Adams to Alexander McGillivray, the Franco-Scottish chief of the Creek Indians whose negotiations with the Washington administration were almost as complex and dishonest as Iran’s today. After dozens of volumes and almost 20 years, I thought we might be slowing down.
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