Reviews for Fame and the Founding Fathers: Essays by Douglass Adair

The average rating for Fame and the Founding Fathers: Essays by Douglass Adair based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-03-05 00:00:00 Natalie Downerson Adair, the former editor of the WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY, also wrote numerous fine articles on the founders of the American republic. Most of the best of those articles are gathered here. The volume includes the title essay, a disquisition on John Adams and his generation's desire for fame; a detective piece on the "Authorship of the Disputed Federalist Papers," arguing that Madison wrote more of the Federalist essays than previously thought; a co-authored piece on Hamilton's religious faith and end-of-life fatalism; and "That Politics May Be Reduced to a Science," a small masterpiece of intellectual history connecting Madison's 10th Federalist essay with David Hume's "Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth." The collection also includes Adair's unfortunate article "The Jefferson Scandals," on the mid-century revival of the Sally Hemings story. Adair found this story too "lurid" and "sensational" to believe, and declared Jefferson "innocent of the charge that he fathered a mulatto family" (256). Adair then suggested that Jefferson's nephew Peter Carr was the real father of Hemings' children, a charge that other white male historians accepted - apart from those who preferred Dumas Malone's assertion that Samuel Carr was the father - until 1998. That year, DNA analysis of the Hemings descendants demonstrated that there was no genetic link between the Carr family and the Hemings family. Adair's detective work in this essay now looks dated and defensive. If one is interested in improving one's writing and analytic abilities, however, Adair's other essays are good models to follow.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-08-03 00:00:00 Paul Bondy Quite a bit of political bias towards the end.