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Bonaparte, perhaps you originally steered me to McDonald, I can't recall. You and Huck should drop in here every so often if you can.

As an amateur reader of history, I was lucky to have Forrest McDonald’s writing recommended to me by a poster.

Growing up in the fifties and sixties, my peers and I were force-fed the liberal Charles Beard’s Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, a book that leftist professors are still calling “a classic” today and forcing on students. Well, starting with his doctoral work, McDonald formed a “test” of those theories in 1958 and subsequently demolished them in We the People: The Economic Origins of the Constitution. We have that destruction to thank him for if for nothing else in his long career.

While considered by many to be a historian with a conservative bent, he has some surprising opinions based upon his research. Before you doubt him, remember that his professorship at Alabama was the “Distinguished Research Professor of History”. Many of his books are published by the University of Kansas Press, Lawrence, KS.

Two books of McDonald that I enjoy referring to are:

Novus Ordo Seclorum, The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution by Forrest McDonald (ISBN 0-7006-0311-5)
States’ Rights and the Union; Imperium in Imperio by Forrest McDonald (ISBN 0-7006-1040-5)