Best biography of aaron burr

From Publishers Weekly

Does Burr belong in the pantheon of founding fathers? Or is he, as historians have asserted ever since he fatally shot Alexander Hamilton in a duel, a faux founder who happened to be in the right place at the right time? Was he really the enigmatic villain, the political schemer who lacked any moral core, the sexual pervert, the cherubic-faced slanderer so beloved of popular imagination? This striking new biography by Isenberg (Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America) argues that Burr was, indeed, the real thing, a founder "at the center of nation building" and a "capable leader in New York political circles." Interestingly, if controversially, Isenberg believes Burr was "the only founder to embrace feminism," the only one who "adhered to the ideal that reason should transcend party differences." Far from being an empty vessel, she says, Burr defended freedom of speech, wanted to expand suffrage and was a proponent of equal rights. Burr was not without his

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Aaron Burr

Vice President of the United States from to

For other uses, see Aaron Burr (disambiguation).

Aaron Burr
Portrait c.&#;
In office March 4, &#;– March 4,
President	Thomas Jefferson
Preceded by	Thomas Jefferson
Succeeded by	George Clinton
In office March 4, &#;– March 3,
Preceded by	Philip Schuyler
Succeeded by	Philip Schuyler
In office September 29, &#;– November 8,
Governor	George Clinton
Preceded by	Richard Varick
Succeeded by	Morgan Lewis
In office July 1, &#;– June 30,
In office July 1, &#;– June 30,
Born	Aaron Burr Jr. ()February 6, Newark, Province of New Jersey, British America
Died	September 14, () (aged&#;80) Staten Island, New York, U.S.
Resting place	Princeton Cemetery
Political party	Democratic-Republican
Spouses	Eliza Jumel &#; &#; (m.&#;; div.&#;)&#;
Children	10 or more, including Theodosia, John, and • He Was No Alexander Hamilton The truth about most popular history,&#; Nancy Isenberg writes in Fallen Founder, her new life of Aaron Burr, is that even when it is not patriotically inspired, it is made up of dangerous shortcuts…. History is not a bedtime story…. We cannot make eighteenth-century men and women ‘familiar&#; by endowing them and their families with the emotions we prefer to universalize; nor should we try to equate their politics with politics we understand. But this is what popular biographers do…. Popular historians, in other words, are what Sir Herbert Butterfield called Whiggish in their approach to history. They look to the past to understand how countries such as Great Britain and the United States have come to enjoy the liberties that characterize their present life. Like Butterfield, Isenberg—the Mary Frances Barnard Chair in 19th-Century American History at the University of Tulsa—rejects Whig history as insufficiently attentive to the pastness of the p