Scholarship
Among the products of the New York Public Library's Constitution Bicentennial Project was Bernstein's first book, Are We to Be a Nation? The Making of the Constitution, published by Harvard University Press. Following Are We to Be a Nation?, Bernstein published Amending America: If We Love the Constitution So Much, Why Do We Keep Trying to Change It?, a history of the U.S. Constitution's amending process and the successful and unsuccessful attempts to amend the Constitution from 1789 through the early 1990s; Thomas Jefferson and Bolling v. Bolling: Law and the Legal Profession in Pre-Revolutionary America, coedited with Barbara Wilcie Kern and Bernard Schwartz (the full text, transcribed with scholarly annotations, of the pleadings and arguments of a complicated 1770 lawsuit about wills and bequests that pitted George Wythe against Thomas Jefferson); and Thomas Jefferson, published in 2003. Gordon S. Wood, reviewing Bernstein's Thomas Jefferson for The New York Times Book Review, called the book "the best short biography of Jefferson ever written."
Bernstein also co-edited several books with Professor Stephen L. Schechter of Russell Sage College, including Well Begun: Chronicles of the Early National Period (1989), New York and the Union: Contributions to the American Constitution Experience (1990), New York and the Bicentennial (1990), and Contexts of the Bill of Rights (1990). Roots of the Republic: American Founding Documents Interpreted, coedited with Schechter and Donald S. Lutz of the University of Houston, also appeared in 1990.
Bernstein's latest book is The Founding Fathers Reconsidered (Oxford University Press, 2009), which on February 19, 2010, was named one of three finalists for the George Washington Book Prize sponsored by Washington College in partnership with the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and George Washington's Mount Vernon. His books-in-progress include a concise life of John Adams modeled on his 2003 biography of Thomas Jefferson; a study of the First Congress as an experiment in government; and an examination of the place of scientific ideas and technological developments in American constitutional history.
Read more about this topic: Richard B. Bernstein
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