'A Shilly-Shally Thing:’ The Constitution, the Presidency, and Alexander Hamilton

Event Details

This event is part of the Historical Presidency Series

Joanne Freeman is a professor of history and American studies at Yale. She specializes in the politics and political culture of the revolutionary and early national periods of American History. She earned her PhD at the University of Virginia. Her most recent book, Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic, won the Best Book award from the Society of Historians of the Early American Republic, and her edited volume, Alexander Hamilton: Writings (Library of America), was one of the Atlantic Monthly’s “best books” of 2001.  Her current project, The Field of Blood: Congressional Violence in Antebellum America, explores physical violence in the U.S. Congress between 1830 and the Civil War, and what it suggests about the institution of Congress, the nature of American sectionalism, the challenges of a young nation’s developing democracy, and the longstanding roots of the Civil War.