“A treasure trove for financial and public policy geeks . . . will also help lay readers go beyond the hit musical in understanding Hamilton’s lasting significance.” —Publishers Weekly While serving as the first treasury secretary from 1789 to 1795, Alexander Hamilton engineered a financial revolution. He established the treasury debt market, the dollar, and a central bank, while strategically prompting private entrepreneurs to establish securities markets and stock exchanges and encouraging state governments to charter a number of commercial banks and other business corporations. Yet despite a recent surge of interest in Hamilton, US financial modernization has not been fully recognized as one of his greatest achievements. This book traces the development of Hamilton’s financial thinking, policies, and actions through a selection of his writings. Financial historians and Hamilton experts Richard Sylla and David J. Cowen provide commentary that demonstrates the impact Hamilton had on the modern economic system, guiding readers through Hamilton’s distinguished career. It showcases Hamilton’s thoughts on the nation’s founding, the need for a strong central government, problems such as a depreciating paper currency and weak public credit, and the architecture of the financial system. His great state papers on public credit, the national bank, the mint, and manufactures instructed reform of the nation’s finances and jumpstarted economic growth. Hamilton practiced what he preached: he played a key role in the founding of three banks and a manufacturing corporation—and his deft political maneuvering and economic savvy saved the fledgling republic’s economy during the country’s first full-blown financial crisis in 1792. “A fascinating examination of Hamiltonian economics.” —The Washington Times

In retelling the story of the Radical Alexander Hamilton, Parenti rewrites the history early America and global economic history writ large. For much of the twentieth century, Hamilton - sometimes seen as the bad boy of the founding fathers or portrayed as the patron saint of bankers- was out of fashion. In contrast his rival Thomas Jefferson, the patrician democrat and slave owner who feared government overreach, was claimed by all. But more recently, Hamilton has become a subject of serious interest again. He was a contradictory mix: a tough soldier, austere workaholic, exacting bureaucrat, yet also a sexual libertine, and a glory-obsessed romantic with suicidal tendencies. As Parenti argues, we have yet to fully appreciate Hamilton as the primary architect of American capitalism and the developmental state. In exploring his life and work, Parenti rediscovers this gadfly as a path breaking political thinker and institution builder. In this vivid historical portrait, Hamilton emerges as a singularly important historical figure: a thinker and politico who laid the foundation for America's ascent to global supremacy - for better or worse.

Probably no American statesman displayed more constructive imagination than did Alexander Hamilton. Prodigal of ideas, bursting with plans for diversifying the economy, and obsessed by a determination to make the United States a powerful nation under a centralized government, he left an imprint upon this country that time has not effaced. Alexander Hamilton and the Growth of the New Nation is the premier biography of Alexander Hamilton written by one of the foremost scholars of early American history. Hamilton's career was at times contradictory: born, in John Adams's words, the "bastard brat of a Scotch peddler," he rose to high social, political, and military position in the newly born country. He dreaded divisiveness, yet his strategies and actions aggravated political sectionalism. Miller weaves together the complex facets of Hamilton's life to make a vivid, absorbing biography.

Classic Books Library presents this brand new edition of “The Federalist Papers”, a collection of separate essays and articles compiled in 1788 by Alexander Hamilton. Following the United States Declaration of Independence in 1776, the governing doctrines and policies of the States lacked cohesion. “The Federalist”, as it was previously known, was constructed by American statesman Alexander Hamilton, and was intended to catalyse the ratification of the United States Constitution. Hamilton recruited fellow statesmen James Madison Jr., and John Jay to write papers for the compendium, and the three are known as some of the Founding Fathers of the United States. Alexander Hamilton (c. 1755–1804) was an American lawyer, journalist and highly influential government official. He also served as a Senior Officer in the Army between 1799-1800 and founded the Federalist Party, the system that governed the nation’s finances. His contributions to the Constitution and leadership made a significant and lasting impact on the early development of the nation of the United States.

Alexander Hamilton is one of the least understood, most important, and most impassioned and inspiring of the founding fathers. At last Hamilton has found a modern biographer who can bring him to full-blooded life; Richard Brookhiser. In these pages, Alexander Hamilton sheds his skewed image as the "bastard brat of a Scotch peddler," sex scandal survivor, and notoriously doomed dueling partner of Aaron Burr. Examined up close, throughout his meteoric and ever-fascinating (if tragically brief) life, Hamilton can at last be seen as one of the most crucial of the founders. Here, thanks to Brookhiser's accustomed wit and grace, this quintessential American lives again.

One of America's foremost historians brilliantly brings to life the fierce struggle - both public and, ultimately, bitterly personal - between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton - two rivals whose opposing visions of what the United States should be continue to shape our country to this day.

Alexander Hamilton is commonly seen as the standard-bearer of an ideology-turned-political party, the Federalists, engaged in a struggle for the soul of the young United States against the Anti-Federalists, and later, the Jeffersonian Republicans. Alexander Hamilton and the Development of American Law counters such conventional wisdom with a new, more nuanced view of Hamilton as a true federalist, rather than a one-dimensional nationalist, whose most important influence on the American founding is his legal legacy. In this analytical biography, Kate Elizabeth Brown recasts our understanding of Hamilton's political career, his policy achievements, and his significant role in the American founding by considering him first and foremost as a preeminent lawyer who applied law and legal arguments to accomplish his statecraft. In particular, Brown shows how Hamilton used inherited English legal principles to accomplish his policy goals, and how state and federal jurists adapted these Hamiltonian principles into a distinct, republican jurisprudence throughout the nineteenth century. When writing his authoritative commentary on the nature of federal constitutional power in The Federalist, Hamilton juxtaposed the British constitution with the new American one he helped to create; when proposing commercial, monetary, banking, administrative, or foreign policy in Washington's cabinet, he used legal arguments to justify his desired course of action. In short, lawyering, legal innovation, and common law permeated Alexander Hamilton's professional career. Re-examining Hamilton's post-war accomplishments through the lens of law, Brown demonstrates that Hamilton's much-studied political career, as well as his contributions to republican political science, cannot be fully understood without recognizing and investigating how Hamilton used Anglo-American legal principles to achieve these ends. A critical re-evaluation of Hamilton's legacy, as well as his place in the founding era, Brown’s work also enhances and refines our understanding of the nature and history of American jurisprudence.

Like its current citizens, the United States was born in debt-a debt so deep that it threatened to destroy the young nation. Thomas Jefferson considered the national debt a monstrous fraud on posterity, while Alexander Hamilton believed debt would help America prosper. Both, as it turns out, were right. One Nation Under Debt explores the untold history of America's first national debt, which arose from the immense sums needed to conduct the American Revolution. Noted economic historian Robert Wright, Ph.D. tells in riveting narrative how a subjugated but enlightened people cast off a great tyrant-“but their liberty, won with promises as well as with the blood of patriots, came at a high price.” He brings to life the key events that shaped the U.S. financial system and explains how the actions of our forefathers laid the groundwork for the debt we still carry today. As an economically tenuous nation by Revolution's end, America's people struggled to get on their feet. Wright outlines how the formation of a new government originally reduced the nation's debt-but, as debt was critical to this government's survival, it resurfaced, to be beaten back once more. Wright then reveals how political leaders began accumulating massive new debts to ensure their popularity, setting the financial stage for decades to come. Wright traces critical evolutionary developments-from Alexander Hamilton's creation of the nation's first modern capital market, to the use of national bonds to further financial goals, to the drafting of state constitutions that created non-predatory governments. He shows how, by the end of Andrew Jackson's administration, America's financial system was contributing to national growth while at the same time new national and state debts were amassing, sealing the fate for future generations.

Papers of the National Bureau of Economic Research conference held at Dartmouth College on May 8-9, 2009.