Early Americanist Textual Scholarship: (Post-)Revolutionary Papers

In this section, we continue our occasional series assessing critical editions and other primary-source texts of potential use to students, general readers, and professional scholars alike. In this installment, we focus on recently published papers by Revolutionary-era public intellectuals John Adams, John Jay, James Madison, and George Washington. From the insufficiency of the Articles of Confederation to the valuation of horses, and from the intricacies of the Jay Treaty to the perceived threat of the Barbary States, these papers address concerns of continuing and even renewed relevance to contemporary scholarship, each in a characteristically distinct voice. The authors in question often wrote to (and occasionally about) each other, which makes the opportunity to discuss the volumes as a whole particularly compelling.