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Notes -
If I wanted to cover all the obvious blind spots of the revolutionary period of the United States what books should I read?
I found Thomas Jefferson's selected writings very interesting but I'm wary about my ability to interpret certain things given how little I know about the other Founding Fathers or knowledge of what pressing political questions would have been at the forefront for him while he was writing (beyond what can be gleaned from the writings themselves).
I would recommend looking for digitized versions of contemporary newspapers, focusing especially on the pseudonymous letters to the editor that were a very popular form of political debate at the time (there are tons of letters "from a Connecticut/Virginia/etc. Farmer" written by local elites arguing over the political issues of the day. Luckily there are a lot of non-profits out there who exist for the sole purpose of making this kind of stuff available for free online, so hopefully it shouldnt be too hard to find.
When I was in law school, I took a seminar with Philip Hamburger called "Constitutional Ideas of the Founding Era," which was focused on reading exactly these sorts of oft-overlooked texts, along with sermons and some other pieces of "common" writing. It was absolutely fascinating, and I was shocked by how incredibly radical and open-minded our forbears were. There seemed to be no preconceptions about how things should be done, and citizens were openly debating things like whether constitutions or governments can ever be legitimate at all, in the major newspapers of the day. They were arguing about whether the Quakers should be allowed citizenship or not because of their pacifism. All kinds of wacky stuff. It really gave me a new appreciation for how human the founding generation was, and how, in many ways, the elites who we learn about in school were just as divorced from the ordinary citizen and their concerns as elites are today (apparently, literally the only thing anyone cared about in the 1780s was debt relief, which I don't remember being more than a footnote when discussing the Articles of Confederation in school). I might still have my old course reader lying around somewhere if you're interested in some more specific suggestions.
I'll take a few suggestions for sure, thanks!
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