Why I'm Obsessed With Early American History
Why I’m Obsessed With Early American History
Author: Slava Akhmechet (@spakhm; long post on X, October 27, 2026) URL: https://x.com/spakhm/status/2115098212495135229 One-line: Ten reasons the founding era rewards obsession: it is a portal into Europe, antiquity and the Enlightenment, it has history’s most remarkable cast and its best letters, and it teaches what to ignore in a chaotic present.
He started out writing “why everyone should study early American history,” got stuck because “the premise is too presumptuous,” and wrote why he is obsessed instead.
Key claims (his ten reasons)
- A portal into other histories. Jefferson, Adams and Franklin spent ten years in Paris courting France against England (the France of Louis XVI); Franklin spent a decade in London; Adams raised money in the Netherlands; John Quincy Adams was ambassador to Russia and saw Napoleon’s invasion.
- A portal into the past. The founders “cannot shut up about Greece and Rome”: Cicero, Thucydides, Tacitus, Plutarch, Homer. Jefferson’s obsession with the English civil war ties Charles I and Cromwell to the Declaration 120 years later.
- The Enlightenment. Adam Smith, Hume, Paine, Burke (Franklin knew them all), electricity, hot air balloons, modern chemistry, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, Franklin meeting Voltaire.
- The Founding Fathers. JFK’s Nobel dinner line about the White House’s greatest gathering of talent “except when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.” Much of America’s success relative to the French, Russian, Cuban or Iranian revolutions is “that America was founded by better men.”
- The correspondence. Letters from John and Abigail Adams, Jefferson and Benjamin Rush are among his favorite writing “in any genre.”
- What to discount. An X feed in 1778 would have shown ~20% opposing independence, a bigger uncommitted middle, smallpox, hyperinflation, mutinies, desertions and atrocities. “If you had let these events consume your attention, you would have misjudged the moment completely!”
- The bones of the republic. Adams’s Massachusetts constitution kept a Christian test and tax-supported churches; Jefferson extended religious freedom to all faiths. Seeing the same tensions recur “makes it easier to get your bearings in the present.”
- The history is tangled. The unmarked slave burial ground about 500 feet below Mount Vernon, where groups of 11-year-olds laugh and take selfies.
- The losers’ view. How did Britain win almost every battle and still lose? What were Howe and Clinton thinking? What became of the loyalists?
- Inspiration. Jefferson’s return after disgrace as Virginia’s governor and the deaths of his wife and four children; Washington at Valley Forge. The Declaration “was written for all humanity” and may yet be read “on the streets of Tehran and Moscow.”
Notable quotes
People naively think early America sits to the side, unconnected to anything else. It’s the opposite!
You will not find a more remarkable cast in all of history!
the gateway drug is McCullough’s John Adams, don’t look at the reviews, don’t research alternatives, just click buy and read the first page
buy a physical book and destroy the margins with your notes, don’t dishonor this adventure with some pristine copy or a kindle
Replies worth keeping
- Asked for a reading list, he pointed to the ending (McCullough’s John Adams). On John Adams: “Its flaw is that no other book will measure up.” Another reader recommended The First American (Franklin) and Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton.
How it connects
- John Adams by David McCullough: his “gateway drug.”
- Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Federalist Papers.
- A Civilization Ashamed of Itself Cannot Lead: the same month’s Stanford Review call to put the Founders back on the syllabus.