Roger Sherman (1721-1793) was the only founder to sign the Articles of Association, the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution. He served 1,543 days in the Continental Congress and was a member of the five-man committee that drafted the Declaration of Independence. At the Federal Convention of 1787 he spoke more times than all but three delegates and was the driving force behind the Connecticut Compromise. As a Representative and Senator in the new republic, he played critical roles in debates over the Bill of Rights, the assumption of state debts, and the creation of a national bank. He was also one of the leading political leaders in Connecticut for the latter part of the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, no book dedicated to his writings has ever been published. Collected Works of Roger Sherman brings together essays, documents, records of his remarks in the Constitutional Convention and in the First Federal Congress, and important representative letters Sherman wrote to a variety of correspondents, including: 1768 letter to William Samuel Johnson, emphasizing Parliament's limited authority over the colonies 1772 letter to the theologian Joseph Bellamy, criticizing Bellamy's position on a congregation's ability to fire its minister 1777 letter to Richard Henry Lee, addressing a number of economic issues 1789 series of letters between Sherman and John Adams, exploring the nature of republican government and the proper scope of presidential power. Mark David Hall is Herbert Hoover Distinguished Professor of Politics and Faculty Fellow in the William Penn Honors Program at George Fox University. In addition to editing, with Kermit L. Hall, the Collected Works of James Wilson (Liberty Fund, 2007) and, with Daniel L. Dreisbach, The Sacred Rights of Conscience: Selected Readings on Religious Liberty and Church-State Relations in the American Founding (Liberty Fund, 2009), he has written Roger Sherman and the Creation of the American Republic (Oxford University Press, 2013).

One of leading figures of his day, Roger Sherman was a member of the five-man committee that drafted the Declaration of Independence and an influential delegate at the Constitutional Convention. As a Representative and Senator in the new republic, he had a hand in determining the proper scope of the national government's power as well as drafting the Bill of Rights. In Roger Sherman and the Creation of the American Republic, Mark David Hall explores Sherman's political theory and shows how it informed his many contributions to America's founding. A close examination of Sherman's religious beliefs provides insight into how those beliefs informed his political actions. Hall shows that Sherman, like many founders, was influenced by Calvinist political thought, a tradition that played a role in the founding generation's opposition to Great Britain, and led them to develop political institutions designed to prevent corruption, promote virtue, and protect rights. Contrary to oft-repeated assertions that the founders advocated a strictly secular policy, Hall argues persuasively that most founders believed Christianity should play an important role in the new American republic.

Stimulating and masterly study examines the evolution of the great mass of fiction surrounding the Arthurian legend in Western literature — from Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain and the collection of Welsh tales known as The Mabinogion, to Chrétien de Troyes' Arthurian stories, the Parzival of Wolfram von Eschenbach, and such English masterpieces as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Le Morte d'Arthur. Painstakingly researched and brimming with scholarly insight, this highly readable and entertaining work will be a favorite with general audiences as well as scholars and students of the Arthurian legend.

In a recent sale catalog, one bookseller apologized for the condition of a sixteenth-century volume as "rather soiled by use." When the book was displayed the next year, the exhibition catalogue described it as "well and piously used [with] marginal notations in an Elizabethan hand [that] bring to life an early and earnest owner"; and the book's buyer, for his part, considered it to be "enlivened by the marginal notes and comments." For this collector, as for an increasing number of cultural historians and historians of the book, a marked-up copy was more interesting than one in pristine condition. William H. Sherman recovers a culture that took the phrase "mark my words" quite literally. Books from the first two centuries of printing are full of marginalia and other signs of engagement and use, such as customized bindings, traces of food and drink, penmanship exercises, and doodles. These marks offer a vast archive of information about the lives of books and their place in the lives of their readers. Based on a survey of thousands of early printed books, Used Books describes what readers wrote in and around their books and what we can learn from these marks by using the tools of archaeologists as well as historians and literary critics. The chapters address the place of book-marking in schools and churches, the use of the "manicule" (the ubiquitous hand-with-pointing-finger symbol), the role played by women in information management, the extraordinary commonplace book used for nearly sixty years by Renaissance England's greatest lawyer-statesman, and the attitudes toward annotated books among collectors and librarians from the Middle Ages to the present. This wide-ranging, learned, and often surprising book will make the marks of Renaissance readers more visible and legible to scholars, collectors, and bibliophiles.

The medieval legend of the Grail, a tale about the search for supreme mystical experience, has never ceased to intrigue writers and scholars by its wildly variegated forms: the settings have ranged from Britain to the Punjab to the Temple of Zeus at Dodona; the Grail itself has been described as the chalice used by Christ at the Last Supper, a stone with miraculous youth-preserving virtues, a vessel containing a man's head swimming in blood; the Grail has been kept in a castle by a beautiful damsel, seen floating through the air in Arthur's palace, and used as a talisman in the East to distinguish the chaste from the unchaste. In his classic exploration of the obscurities and contradictions in the major versions of this legend, Roger Sherman Loomis shows how the Grail, once a Celtic vessel of plenty, evolved into the Christian Grail with miraculous powers. Loomis bases his argument on historical examples involving the major motifs and characters in the legends, beginning with the Arthurian legend recounted in the 1180 French poem by Chrtien de Troyes. The principal texts fall into two classes: those that relate the adventures of the knights in King Arthur's time and those that account for the Grail's removal from the Holy Land to Britain. Written with verve and wit, Loomis's book builds suspense as he proceeds from one puzzle to the next in revealing the meaning behind the Grail and its legends.

There were many writers other than John Jay, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton who, in 1787 and 1788, argued for the Constitution's ratification. In a collection central to our understanding of the American founding, Friends of the Constitution brings together forty-nine of the most important of these "other" Federalists' writings. Colleen A. Sheehan is Professor of Political Science at Villanova University. Gary L. McDowell is the Tyler Haynes Interdisciplinary Professor of Leadership Studies, Political Science, and Law at the University of Richmond in Virginia. From 1992 to 2003 he was the Director of the Institute of United States Studies in the University of London.

This two-volume set brings together a collection of writings and speeches by James Wilson, one of only six signers of both the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution. His works had a significant impact on the deliberations that produced the cornerstone documents of American democracy.

A distinguished professor debunks the assertion that America's Founders were deists who desired the strict separation of church and state and instead shows that their political ideas were profoundly influenced by their Christian convictions. In 2010, David Mark Hall gave a lecture at the Heritage Foundation entitled "Did America Have a Christian Founding?" His balanced and thoughtful approach to this controversial question caused a sensation. C-SPAN televised his talk, and an essay based on it has been downloaded more than 300,000 times. In this book, Hall expands upon this essay, making the airtight case that America's Founders were not deists. He explains why and how the Founders' views are absolutely relevant today, showing that they did not create a "godless" Constitution; that even Jefferson and Madison did not want a high wall separating church and state; that most Founders believed the government should encourage Christianity; and that they embraced a robust understanding of religious liberty for biblical and theological reasons. This compelling and utterly persuasive book will convince skeptics and equip believers and conservatives to defend the idea that Christian thought was crucial to the nation's founding--and that this benefits all of us, whatever our faith (or lack of faith).

Presents the lives, deaths, and scandals involving the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence, including John Adams, John Hancock, and Thomas Jefferson.