Founding Visions: The Ideas, Individuals, and Intersections that Created America

Lance Banning was a distinguished historian whose work focused on the founding era of the United States. His first book, The Jeffersonian Persuasion: Evolution of a Party Ideology, examined the ideas and principles underlying political conflict in the early American Republic. His later work, The Sacred Fire of Liberty: James Madison and the Founding of the Federal Republic, won the Merle Curti Award in Intellectual History from the Organization of American Historians and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Banning was compiling this collection of his essays and writings on the Founding when he died before completing the project. Editor Todd Estes prepared the manuscript for publication. Founding Visions presents Banning's most significant essays on the period, with a foreword by Gordon S. Wood, making his work available to students, scholars, and general readers.