Between October 1787 and August 1788, a collection of 85 articles and essays were distributed by the Federalist movement. Authored by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist Papers highlighted the political divisions of their time.

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What importance do the civilizations of the ancient Mediterranean have for us? This question has been answered in different ways over the centuries, but for a long time the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome have been attractive as a baseline and a model, be it in economic, aesthetic, cultural, military, or political terms.

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Theatergoers have been dazzled by the new Broadway hit Hamilton, and not just by its titular lead: the Schuyler women often steal the show. While Alexander Hamilton’s wife Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton provides heart and pathos, her sister Angelica Schuyler Church is sassy, witty, and flirtatious.

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On Valentine’s Day, we usually think of romance and great love stories. But there is another type of love we often overlook: love between friends, particularly between men and women in a platonic friendship. This is not a new phenomenon: loving friendships were possible and even fairly common among elite men and women in America’s founding era. These were affectionate relationships of mutual respect, emotional support, and love that had to carefully skirt the boundaries of romance. While extravagant declarations of love would have raised eyebrows, these friends found socially acceptable ways to express their affection for one another. Learn more about some special pairs of platonic friends from early America, including some very familiar names.

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  Eloise Payne and William Ellery Channing

  William was best known as a Unitarian minister and early transcendentalist, but to a bright young teacher named Eloise he was “my dear friend.” Eloise looked to William, seven years her senior, for religious and professional advice, but she wasn’t afraid to rebuke him when he became too critical. When she worried that his affections were waning after he started courting the woman who would become his wife, he replied, “You hold the same place in my heart as ever, and I can now say to you with more propriety than before, that few hold a higher.” (Photo credit: Public Domain via The Frick Collection.)

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  George Washington and Elizabeth Powel

  George and Elizabeth met while George was in Elizabeth’s hometown of Philadelphia for the Constitutional Convention. George often spent the evening with Elizabeth and she later visited him at Mount Vernon. They had frank political discussions and exchanged gifts for over a decade. For her fiftieth birthday, George sent her a poetic tribute written by a friend of Elizabeth’s, and he signed one of his last letters to her before his death, “I am truly yours.” (Photo credit: Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.)

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  Thomas Jefferson and Abigail Adams

  Abigail Adams called her friend Thomas Jefferson “one of the choice ones on earth,” and Thomas greatly admired the wife of his long-time friend John Adams. They both lived in Paris in the 1780’s and attended plays and other events together. Later, he jokingly referred to her as Venus; he wrote from Paris that while selecting Roman busts to send for the Adams’ London home, he passed over the figure of Venus because he “thought it out of taste to have two at table at the same time.” (Photo credit: Public Domain via Library of Congress.)

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  Margaret Bayard Smith and Anthony Bleecker

  Margaret and Anthony first met as young adults in New York City as part of the same circle of writers and intellectuals. Some twenty-five years later, Margaret wrote a novel which Anthony helped to edit. The novel’s central love story was based upon her friendship with Anthony. “Has not friendship recollections as sweet and dear as those of love?” she wrote to him. Her answer: “Yes, indeed it has—at least in my heart.” (Photo credit: Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.)

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  John Rodgers and Anne Pinkney

  John Rodgers is best remembered as a navel hero who fought the Barbary pirates and fired the first shots of the War of 1812. But while he was across the Atlantic fighting pirates, he relied on his friend Ann Pinkney at home in Maryland to help further his courtship of a young woman named Minerva Denison. Ann reported back to John on his “goddess” and was pleased to extract a confession of Minerva’s love for John which she passed along. John and Minerva married, while John and Ann remained friends. (Photo credit: Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.)

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  Benjamin Franklin and Georgiana Shipley

  Benjamin Franklin was notorious for his flirtations with women, but it’s likely that most of his flirting was merely part of playful friendships. Such appears to be the case with a teenage girl he befriended in London in 1772, Georgiana Shipley. He gave her a pet squirrel named Mungo as well as a snuff box with his portrait painted on the lid. He declared himself “your affectionate friend” and she was even more effusive: “The love and respect I feel for my much-valued friend are sentiments so habitual to my heart that no time nor circumstance can lessen the affection.” (Photo credit: Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.)

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  Gilbert Stuart and Sarah Wentworth Morton

  Gilbert Stuart is best known for his portraits of presidents, but his friendship with Boston writer Sarah Wentworth Morton prompted his only known poetry. Gilbert created three portraits of Sarah, one of which he kept for himself. She published a poem praising his artistry, beginning with “Stuart, thy portraits speak with skill divine.” He replied that her poetry created “a cheering influence at my heart” and that ultimately poetry was superior to painting. This was a friendship between a very talented pair! (Photo credit: Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.)

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  Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson and Benjamin Rush

  The doctor and writer Benjamin Rush had a long friendship with one of Philadelphia’s smartest women, Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson. Elizabeth wrote Benjamin frequently from her country estate but sometimes worried she didn’t receive enough letters in return. As she wrote in a poem she sent him in 1793, “One Letter a week she surely might claim,/ To keep alive Friendship; and fan its pure Flame.” He may not have written as often as she would like, but he admired her greatly. She was, he said after her death, “a woman of uncommon talents and virtues” who was “beloved by a numerous circle of friends and acquaintances.” (Photo credit: Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.)

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  Eliza Parke Custis and Marquis de Lafayette

  The Marquis de Lafayette formed a lasting bond with George Washington during the American Revolution, and his affections later extended to Washington’s step-granddaughter Eliza Parke Custis. Lafayette was a father figure for Eliza, whose own father died when she was young. Eliza confided her troubles in him and he wrote long letters in reply offering advice and affection. The pair wrote each other for years, with Lafayette conveying his “paternal love” and “most affectionate respectful attachments.” (Photo credit: Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.)

Featured image: Scene at the Signing of the Constitution of the United States, Howard Chandler Christy (1940). Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

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By Elvin Lim

When a nation chooses to celebrate the date of its birth is a decision of paramount significance. Indeed, it is a decision of unparalleled importance for the world’s “First New Nation,” the United States, because it was the first nation to self-consciously write itself into existence with a written Constitution. But a stubborn fact stands out here. This new nation was created in 1787, and the Fourth of July that Americans celebrate today occurred on a different summer eleven years before.

The united States (capitalization, as can be found in the Declaration of Independence, is advised) declared themselves independent on 4 July 1776, but the nation was not yet to be. An act of severance did not a nation make. These united States would only become the United States when the idea of a collective We the People was negotiated and formally set on parchment in the sweltering summer of 1787. This means that while every American celebrates the revolution against government every July 4th, pro-government liberals do not quite have an equivalent red-letter day to celebrate and to mark the equally auspicious revolution in favor of government that transpired in 1787. Perhaps this is why the United States remains exceptional among all developed countries in her half-hearted attitude toward positive liberty, the welfare state, and government regulation on the one hand, and her seeming addiction to guns, individual rights, and negative liberty, on the other. In part because the nation’s greatest national holiday was selected to commemorate severance and not consolidation, (at least half of) America remains frozen in the euphoric tide of the 1770s rather than the more pragmatic, nation-building impulse of the 1780s.

The Fourth of July was only Act One of the creation of the American republic. In the interim years before the nation’s elders (the imprecise but popular nomenclature is “founders”) came together again—this time not to address the curse of the royal yolk, but to discuss the more mundane post-revolutionary crises of interstate conflict especially in matters of trade and debt repayment—the states came to realize that the threat to liberty comes not always from on high by way of royal governors, but also sideways courtesy of newfound friends. In the mid-1780s, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and their compatriots came together to design a more perfect union: a union with the power to lay and collect taxes, to raise and support armies, and an executive to wage war. This was Act Two, or the Second American Founding.

Custom and the convenience of having a bank holiday during the summer when the kids are out of school has hidden the reality of the Two Foundings. We now refer to a single founding, and a set of founders, but this does great injustice to the rich experiential tapestry that helped forge the United States. It denies the very substantive philosophic reasons for why one half of America is so convinced that liberty consists in rejecting government, but one half also thinks that flogging that dead horse with the King long slain seems needlessly self-defeating. As Turgot, the Abbé de Mably, put it in a letter to Dr. Richard Price in 1778, “by striving to prevent imaginary dangers, they have created real ones.” To many Europeans, that the citizens of United States have devoted so much energy—waging even a Civil War—against its own central government and fortifying themselves against it indicates a revolutionary nation in arrested development; a self-contradictory denial that the government of We the People is of, by, and for us.

The United States is thoroughly and still vividly ensconced in the original dilemma of civil society today, whether liberty is best achieved with government or without it. Conservatives and liberals are each so sure that they are the true inheritors of the “founding” because they can point to, respectively, the principles of the First and the Second Foundings to corroborate their account of history. And they will continue to do so for as long as the sacred texts of each of the Two Foundings, the Declaration and the Constitution, stand side by side, seemingly at peace with the other, but in effect in mutual tension.

This Fourth of July, Americans should not despair that the country seems so fundamentally divided on issues from healthcare to Iraq. For if to love is divine, to quarrel is American; and we have been having at it for over two centuries.

Elvin Lim is Associate Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and is the author of The Lovers’ Quarrel: The Two Foundings and American Political Development and The Anti-Intellectual Presidency. He blogs at www.elvinlim.com and his column on politics appears on the OUPblog regularly.

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Jefferson's Sons - 
A Founding Father's Secret Children
Kimberly Brubaker Bradley
Grades 6 - 9

Brubaker Bradley brings to life the story of the four children - Beverly, Harriet, Madison and Eston - that researchers have, after much prodding, historical research and DNA analysis, acknowledged Thomas Jefferson had with one of his slaves, Sally Hemings.

Brubaker Bradley's story begins through the eyes of Beverly Jefferson, the eldest of the four children who survived into adulthood, and follows the story through Madison Jefferson, the middle son, and finally, Peter Fossett, the son of the blacksmith, Joe Fossett, who was sold after Jefferson's death.

It is told from close third from just one character's POV at a time. When Beverly becomes a teenager, Brubaker makes an ingenious transition from his POV to Madison's. So much so, my ten year old exclaimed, "Mama, it's Maddy's story now!" It was like a magic trick that the audience sees but still marvels at. Brubaker Bradley is a pro. I learned a few new tricks.

The story revolves around family. In this particular case, a mother, Sally, who was a slave, yet became, for all intents and purposes, the second wife of Thomas Jefferson after his first wife died. And a father, Thomas Jefferson, who wrote all men were created equal yet kept his own children as slaves. And four children who were the slaves and children of one of the United States' most revered but, as we learn through walking in these children's shoes, hypocritical founding fathers.

Brubaker Bradley spent three years working on this book. It shows. She has taken so much material and blended it so seamlessly. The story is suffused with childhood, slavery, history, philosophy, politics, historical figures. They all come to life.

My youngest daughter and I listened to the audio of this book while in DC and Charlottesville for Spring Break. About halfway through the book, we went to Monticello, Jefferson's home. My daughter's been there before, but it hadn't stuck. This time, though, the home wasn't just one more historical building we walked through. My daughter looked for traces of Hemmings' family members, and Fossetts and Hearns. History wasn't boring. It was alive and had faces. It was so cool. We even listened to a part of the story while sitting on a bench on Mulberry Row, where the slave quarters were at Monticello. Afterwards, when we were listening to Jefferson's Sons again in the car, my daughter said over and over, "oh, yeah", as she remembered the places that were a part of the story. 

This is a book you don't want to miss. The writing is superb. The subject matter begs to be discussed. And the last scene is unforgettable. 

Read it.

There are so many excellent books that have come out for children that take historical facts and weave them into fiction that breathes with life. Another, for slightly younger readers, that embraces an African American wedding tradition, jumping the broom, that is inherently tied to slavery but may actually predate it is Ellen's Broom by Kelly Starling Lyons.

I've never been much of a history fan, until now. Through these two books, I feel as if I've discover

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Do you spend a lot of time on your computer? I do. Between typing in my manuscript (the writing, and then all the editing changes), working on my blog or website, writing book reviews, doing online research, surfing, and even playing the odd computer game, it’s a LOT of time. And it’s so easy for me to get caught up in the work that I’m doing, and ignore my body.

A few years ago, I started to get numbness and tingling pain in my arms. Yep–the symptoms of Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI). Not a good thing. That really scared me, since I need my hands to write, to type, to do art. So I decided to research the subject. I then bought a few tools which, after using them, completely took away the pain and numbness in my arms and wrists, so now I swear by them. I also decided to try to take regular breaks–something that’s very hard for me to do.

Here are the products that I use and I highly recommend to keep your body in good shape while working on the computer:

The Kinesis Advantage Keyboard. I really believe this ergonomic keyboard saved my arms and hands. I researched ergonomic keyboards thoroughly before I purchased this one; many keyboards that are advertised as ergonomic aren’t actually ergonomic. The Kinesis keyboard is. It’s more expensive than many others, but it works. It took away the pain and numbness in my arms, and allowed me to type easily, pain-free.

The one I use, Kinesis Advantage USB, may take some getting used to at first, as the keyboard is contoured, with a separate key well for each hand, which are there to reduce the strain and force you use, and position your arms in an ergonomic position, at shoulder width and with your wrists straight. Once you get used to the keyboard (I had no problems at all), it’s incredibly comfortable and easy-to-use. Any time I’m at a friend’s house and try their regular flat keyboard, I think how awkward and not-well-suited for hands it is, and wish for my Kinesis one.

The Kinesis’ keys are placed for the optimum ease of your fingers; some of the most often used keys (such as “Enter”, “Space”, “Backspace”, “Delete”) are placed in thumb keypads, allowing you to use your thumbs (which are stronger), instead of your overworked and weaker little fingers. There are a lot more ergonomic benefits to this keyboard; you can read about them here.

The Kinesis Advantage keyboard allows both the standard Qwerty layout, and the less-often used but more ergonomic Dvorak layout–AND the keyboard shows both sets of layouts. This is a nice feature; if you use Dvorak, you don’t have to just use it by memory. I decided to switch to theDvorak layout, since it’s better suited for hands. It rearranges the keys so that the ones used most frequently are located on the home row, minimizing finger movement and helping you type faster. It took me a few weeks to retrain myself to type using a Dvorak layout instead of Qwerty, but I’m happy I did.

I have been using my Kinesis keyboard for about three years, and nothing will make me turn back to a regular keyboard. Kinesis has great customer support.

The Kinesis keyboard may seem pricey at $299 US, or $329 US for the Kinesis Advantage keyboard with the Qwerty/Dvorak keyboard, but it’s well worth the money to protect and save your body. It helped me tremendously. I highly recommend it.

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The Evoluent Mouse. This mouse took away the stiffness and pain in my arm, hand, and shoulder that I was getting from using the mouse so much. It positions your hand so that it’s in a neutral handshake position, and the relief is almost instant! The position prevents forearm twisting, which a regular mouse creates. The Evoluent mouse is incredibly comfortable and easy to use. I feel like my hand is actually resting when it’s on the mouse.

All five buttons are placed so that your fingers naturally rest on them, and you need only use a light pressure (but still firm enough that you won’t accidentally click on them). You can program the buttons to do what you want, or leave them at their factory settings. It also has a really easy-to-use wheel, which I use to scroll through pages.

The Evoluent mouse is USB, and has infrared tracking that responds quickly and well to your movements. You can adjust the tracking speed and mouse pointer to your own preference. It is compatible with Windows, Mac, and Linux. They also have a left-handed vertical mouse for lefties.

There are a number of vertical mice out there, but after a lot of online research, I chose this one because it seems to be truly ergonomic, the best in its class, and has great user reviews. I have been using mine for about three years now, and I am delighted with it. I never want to use a regular mouse again! You can read more about the Evoluent mouse’s ergonomic benefits here. Evoluent has fantastic customer support, and they make frequent updates to the driver.

The Evoluent vertical mouse may seem pricey to some users at $80.00 US, but it’s worth every penny. You’ll feel the difference immediately. It saved my mouse arm from strain, pain, and numbness. I highly recommend it.

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Break-time software can also help you to prevent RSI, or just keep your body from hurting too much. Some programs remind you to take a break from your computer at intervals that you set, and others go one step further and remind you to stretch, even showing you some stretches.

A great free anti-RSI program is WorkRave. It reminds you to take both micro breaks and longer breaks, and during the longer (”coffee”) breaks it shows you visuals of some stretches that you can do, and then suggests that you get up and walk away from your computer for the remainder of the 10 minutes. It also allows you to skip the break if you really need to keep working, or to shorten it. Breaks, micro-breaks, and reminders are all customizable; you can choose when and how often you want to be reminded. And you get the bonus of having a cute little sheep sitting in your system tray–along with feeling better in your body, and not injuring yourself. WorkRave is available on GNU/Linux and Windows.

You don’t often find a free anti-RSI program that shows you stretches, and for me, this is an important part of the program. I’m not likely (okay–I won’t at all) to do stretches without that visual reminder. You can scroll through the exercises, or skip one if you don’t like it. The exercises focus especially on areas of the body that can get stiff or ache, including hands, arms, shoulders, neck, and your eyes. It’s a great program, and it doesn’t cost you anything to use. So why not try it out?

For Mac users, there is a free program called Anti-RSI found here. I don’t use Mac, so I can’t tell you if it’s good or not, but the person who posted about it really likes it.

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It’s also important to set up your office so that it’s ergonomic–your keyboard, your desk, your monitor…. You can get some great tips here.I hope this gives you some ideas on how to protect your body, keep yourself healthy, and prevent RSI.

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