THE QUOTABLE FOUNDING FATHERS
Edited by Professor Buckner F. Melton
Brassey's Inc. (2004)
No group is quoted – and at times misquoted – more often than America’s founding fathers. Whenever a political controversy heats up, the nation’s speechwriters, politicians, reporters, editorial writers, and talking heads try to win the debate by quoting the words of the founders. Year-in, year-out, teachers and political buffs look to the wisdom of the founders to illuminate the issues. How much easier it would be for all these people – be they inside or outside the Beltway – if they could find every key quote from the founders in a single source?
THE QUOTABLE FOUNDING FATHERS, edited by Professor Buckner F. Melton, Jr., will be just such source – a compilation of some 2,500 wise and pity quotes summing up the wisdom and wit of all the founders. While a fraction of these quotations can be found in Bartlett’s and similar general quotation dictionaries, such volumes barely skim the surface of what’s available. Our book will mine much deeper into the essays, diaries, letters, speeches, and even sermons of the founders to pull out all the nuggets that are significant to the history of the country and the on-going debate about the meaning of democracy in America. The scope of the book will be broad, encompassing founding mothers (e.g. Abigail Adams and Phillis Wheatly) as well as fathers, Native and African Americans (e.g. Tecumsah and Denmark Vesey), and covering the period from 1600 to 1826 – the year both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died on July 4th.
"Buck" Melton has unique qualifications to edit this book. A historian and law professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he is one of a relatively few scholars to hold both a doctorate in history (Duke University 1990) as well as a law degree (The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1996). He has an impressive record of publications and is also a former editor of The North Carolina Law Review, one of the nation’s leading scholarly law journals. His greatest area of expertise is the history and law of impeachment. His recent book The First Impeachment: The Constitution’s Framers and the Case of Senator William Blount drew excellent reviews and has gone through two printings. That book quickly brought him to the forefront of the debate over the impeachment inquiry into President Clinton’s activities, and he appeared often on Jim Lehrer’s NewsHour, NPR’s Morning Edition and All Things Considered, NBC, MSNBC, CBS, and C-SPAN2. He recently finished a book on the Aaron Burr treason trial, which will be published by John Wiley in Fall 2001.
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