"A long, insightful look at three Founder presidents. Political histories are rarely page-turners, but Gutzman, clearly a scholar who has read everything on his subjects, writes lively prose and displays a refreshingly opinionated eye for a huge cast of characters and their often unfortunate actions. Outstanding historical writing." -- Kirkus (starred review) "[Kevin Gutzman] has an eye for detail and a firm grasp of his period." -- The Wall Street Journal "Though a conservative historian, Gutzman tries to thread the various needles of contemporary conscience, never excusing the slave-owning Southerners, but aware of the risks of judging the ideas of the eighteenth century by the standards of the twenty-first." --Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker "Well-informed . Gutzman draws sharp profiles of the era's leading politicians and military figures" -- Publishers Weekly ".an expansive yet highly detailed account of exactly how this trio of Virginians governed the nation and the legacy of republicanism they left behind.

One of the great virtues of Gutzman's The Jeffersonians is that he generously quotes his subjects, allowing them to speak for themselves. We would do well to listen to them." - The Federalist "With The Jeffersonians, Kevin Gutzman has written a rare and welcome kind of book, one that will satisfy academic historians (insofar as academics can be satisfied), whom he engages across several highly salient scholarly questions. this excellent book will make a worthy addition to any early republic bookshelf and, hopefully, to many an undergraduate syllabus." -- Washington Free Beacon "The fragmented story of the Early Republic gets pieced together in Kevin Gutzman's action-packed account. By recovering the shared vision of Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, The Jeffersonians provides our most cohesive, coherent, and masterful narrative of politics in the first quarter of the nineteenth century." --Robert M. S.

McDonald, United States Military Academy at West Point, author of Confounding Father: Thomas Jefferson's Image in His Own Time "With this book, one of our leading scholars of the talented Virginians who dominated the early American presidency has provided us an engrossing political history of the period, uniting the story of the Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe administrations into a single narrative account. Rich with detail, spiced with wit and shrewd insight, The Jeffersonians will hold interest for the political philosopher and the political junkie alike. But above all, it demonstrates that a persistent theme ran through the political vision of its protagonists: a suspicion of Federal overreach. That theme has lost none of its relevance for us today." --Wilfred McClay, Victor Davis Hanson Chair in Classical History and Western Civilization, Hillsdale College "The fragmented story of the Early Republic gets pieced together in Kevin Gutzman's action-packed account. By recovering the shared vision of Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, The Jeffersonians provides our most cohesive, coherent, and masterful narrative of politics in the first quarter of the nineteenth century." --Robert M. S.

McDonald, United States Military Academy at West Point, author of Confounding Father: Thomas Jefferson's Image in His Own Time "It is rare that political history can be both readable and essential, but Kevin Gutzman has somehow done it. By offering a view from the perspective of Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, Gutzman's Jeffersonians invites readers to understand the accomplishments and failures of the most important and most dominant political coalition in American history." --Jeremy D. Bailey, author of Thomas Jefferson and Executive Power and James Madison and Constitutional Imperfection.