A nation must think before it acts.
Where did the Founders Get their Ideas? America’s Machiavellian Moment and the Origins of the Atlantic Republican Tradition
This essay is based on the First Annual Ginsburg-Satell Lecture on American Character and Identity delivered on May 15, 2018, hosted and co-sponsored by the Museum of the American Revolution. Click here to read the lecture.
In this lecture, FPRI’s Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Walter McDougall delves deeply into the origins of the American political tradition by exploring the legacies of Medieval and Renaissance Europe, and the transmission of these ideas across time and space. Walter A. McDougall is the Ginsburg-Satell Chair of FPRI’s Center for the Study of America and the West. He is also Co-Chair of FPRI’s Madeleine and W.W. Keen Butcher History Institute and the Alloy-Ansin Professor of International Relations and Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. His honors include a Pulitzer Prize, election to the Society of American Historians, and appointment to the Library of Congress Council of Scholars. McDougall is the author of several critically acclaimed books including: The Tragedy of U.S Foreign Policy (2016), Freedom Just Around the Corner: A New American History 1585 -1828 (2005), Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era, 1829-1877 (2008), and Promised Land, Crusader State (1997).
