I am reading historian Gordon Wood's splendid "Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815."
It is an ideal companion for this July Fourth weekend because it reminds us of the great continuities in our politics and national condition. Dynamic social and economic change, concern for the middle class, poisonous politics, bad policies, flawed leaders — they were all there two centuries ago, just as now. There's a lesson here, though perhaps not the one you suspect.
Dynamic change? In 1800, the 5.3 million Americans (nearly a fifth were slaves) had increased by more than a third since 1790. They were moving west at a prodigious pace. Before the Revolution, the Kentucky territory had few settlers; by 1800, the state of Kentucky (1792) had 220,000.