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Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe British North America developed from a landscape of religions into a nation of races over the course of the eighteenth century.This process culminated in a hot, locked Philadelphia hall in 1787, but the lessons upon which the drafters drew reached back to the Reformation of the sixteenth century and earlier to Rome. Americans had, after all, just rejected their inclusion in the British variant. If they failed to grasp the significance of their success, Edward Gibbon’s  Decline and Fall of Rome,  David Hume’s History of England,  and the tales of Robin Hood 1   served to remind them of the dangers of remote rule. Early Modern Europe possessed two empires with established Protestant populations inhabiting borders under perpetual threat. The Holy Roman Empire’s borderland Protestants included the Southwestern Germans of Wuerttemberg and the Rhineland-Palatinate, for whom “ cuius regio, eius religio ” offered precious little protection fro...

Randall Stephens The following excerpt is from Michal Jan Rozbicki's review essay in the June 2013 issue of Historically Speaking .  Rozbicki uses Jon Meacham's Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power (Random House, 2012) to delve into "the cult of great individuals," which even in the present, does not lack enthusiasts.  Rozbicki is professor of history and director of the Center for Intercultural Studies at Saint Louis University. He is the author of Culture and Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution (University of Virginia Press, 2011). One would be hard pressed to find a dull period in Thomas Jefferson’s life. Mindful of that, I began devouring Jon Meacham’s 800-page Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power anticipating a gourmet biographical feast. It started off as an enjoyable and well-paced story but it was not long before the taste of syrup began to take over. By the time I reached page eight I had already been informed that “Jefferson was the most successful ...