All Burr, All the Time

After sailing into the marketplace on Tuesday, American Emperor picked up a terrific review from David Holahan at the Christian Science Monitor, which featured a great opening line:   “If you feel that our contemporary politics are off the rails, you should read David O. Stewart’s vivid account of 19th-century American machinations.”  The review goes…

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Pub Date!

No, it’s not the day we crawl from bar to bar, drinking heavily.  It’s publication day, when American Emperor officially hits the bookstores and Amazon starts shipping.  It’s one of those exciting days when the author passes people on the street and thinks, with a flitting sense of dismay, “They don’t even know that my…

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Lewis Lapham Asks About Burr

Bloomberg.com has just posted a podcast of the interview I did with Lewis Lapham about American Emperor.  Mr. Lapham (it wasn’t long enough to get on a first-name basis) no longer edits Harper’s, which he did for many years, but does put out Lapham’s Quarterly, in addition to doing this series of podcast interviews for…

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Treason: Too Dangerous To Be The Epithet du Jour

Over at Huffington Post, I argue that Rick Perry, Jon Huntsman, and all the rest need to back off on the treason-slinging.  Treason is an emotionally overpowering accusation that the Constitution limits to very specific circumstances.  In Aaron Burr’s treason trial in Richmond in 1807, Chief Justice John Marshall aggressively enforced the limits on treason. …

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Calling Mr. Madison!

The current financial crisis surrounding Greece has the European Union (EU) reliving an American nightmare of the 1780s.  Then, the Articles of Confederation bound the thirteen states together with ties that were both loose and clumsy, and that failed.  The parallels are plain: A group of states join together for mutual advantage. History and pride…

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