'One of the most imaginative and suggestive works on the Washington years. McDonald has demonstrated in this work that presidential history can still be lively and compelling.'

George Thatcher served as a U.S. representative from Maine throughout the Federalist Era (1789-1801)--the most critical and formative period of American constitutional history. A moderate on most political issues, the Cape Cod native and Harvard-educated lawyer proved a maverick in matters relating to education, the expansion of the slave interest, the rise of Unitarianism, and the separation of church and state. Written over his forty-year career as a country lawyer, national legislator, and state supreme court justice, the over two hundred letters and miscellaneous writings selected for this edition will appeal to historians, lawyers and legal scholars, teachers, and genealogists as an encyclopedic resource on the Founding generation, and to all readers captivated by the dramatic immediacy and inherent authenticity of personal letters. Following Thatcher's journey as a New England Federalist, abolitionist, religious dissenter, and pedagogical innovator is to add depth and complexity to our understanding of the early American Republic. Distributed for the Colonial Society of Massachusetts

Includes the proceedings of the Society.

Tom Paine's 'Agrarian Justice' (1797) continues to inspire progressive politicians today as a source of two contemporary policies, Land Value Taxation and Universal (Basic) Income (Citizen's Income). His starting point was the belief, widespread until the end of the eighteenth century, that the Earth is the common property of humankind. Rather than advocating the common ownership of land, he proposed that landowners 'owe to the community a ground-rent', the market rent of their land. He advocated that this be paid into a fund to be used for the benefit of all, both as a lump sum payment on reaching adulthood and as a pension for older people. He is well worth reading for his passion and rhetoric. This publication also includes a riposte written in the same year by Thomas Spence, who had published a similar but more radical proposal in 1776. It also contains a 20th century re-statement of individual and common rights to the Earth and a summary of the relevance of Agrarian Justice today.