Founding Fathers

The generation that made the American Revolution and the Constitution, and the body of biography, political philosophy and history written about them. In the wiki the term works as a hub for that reading, both what Kyle has read and what sits in the reading queue.

• Read. Founders’ Son is Richard Brookhiser’s intellectual biography of Abraham Lincoln as the self-conscious heir of the founders: Lincoln came of age just as they were dying, and his generation’s central anxiety was whether the heirs could “supply their places with other pillars.” Alexander Hamilton carries a note in which Kyle describes a “deep and complicated relationship with long-form biographies of the founding fathers,” from John Adams to Hamilton. Richard Brookhiser is filed as author of the Lincoln study.
• Queued: biography. Washington — A Life (Ron Chernow), The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (Gordon S. Wood), Patriots (Langguth) (A. J. Langguth) and Born Fighting (James Webb).
• Queued: the founders’ ideas and sources. The Founders’ Constitution (Kurland and Lerner, eds.), Novus Ordo Seclorum (Forrest McDonald), What the Anti-Federalists Were For (Herbert J. Storing), The Founders and the Classics (Carl J. Richard), The Roots of the American Order (Russell Kirk), The Machiavellian Moment (J. G. A. Pocock), Crisis of the House Divided (Harry V. Jaffa), and the sources the founders read: Second Treatise of Government (Locke), Cato’s Letters (Trenchard and Gordon), Common Sense (Thomas Paine), Essays (Hume) and On Justice, Power, and Human Nature (Thucydides).
• Several of these were saved from published reading lists, such as A Library to Build Great Americans, where Cato’s Letters is listed under Political Philosophy and Born Fighting under History.

Where this appears

Books

• Founders’ Son
• Alexander Hamilton

People

• Richard Brookhiser
• Abraham Lincoln

Books to read

• Washington — A Life, The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin, Patriots (Langguth), Born Fighting, The Founders’ Constitution, Novus Ordo Seclorum, What the Anti-Federalists Were For, The Founders and the Classics, The Roots of the American Order, The Machiavellian Moment, Crisis of the House Divided, Second Treatise of Government, Cato’s Letters, Common Sense (Thomas Paine), Essays (Hume), On Justice, Power, and Human Nature