This lists includes mostly collections of primary sources—pieces written by the greatest thinkers of our country, as well as pieces by some not-so-great individuals—and a few secondary sources about those figures.
The founding members of Project 250 can all say that reading this piece was their first exposure to the work of the Ashbrook Center. It is perhaps too short to be its own individual, but the author wrote very few books, none of which we yet own, and none which would include this short autobiographical piece, thus we took the time to recopy it from a hard copy in order to make it available to everyone. Just how important it is compared to everything else on this list has still not been agreed by our members, but its relative brevity makes it easy to read, and the life and work of its author makes it just as great as the second item on this list as an introduction to everything we are prepared to fight for.
Almost 30 years old now, this book is the peak of literature addressing all the lies commonly made in the past 100 years about our Founding Fathers in order to discredit our country and everything it was founded on. In the first chapter, Dr. West shows us to understand the Founders as they understood themselves, that reading the Constitution and the Declaration on their own is not enough to understand them—they need to be read along with the letters these late thinkers wrote to their friends and family on the issues of liberty and racial equality. He explains how we know what the Founders meant by “all men”, and how leading historians on the issue have failed us and willfully misled us as young citizens with their misforming textbooks by willfully misinterpreting or overlooking the written evidence against their claims, the efforts that the rebelling colonists took to free their slaves, the measures taken at the Constitutional Convention to enable the future abolition of slavery, and why they were unable to end slavery altogether in the early years of our republic. In the second chapter he discusses the Founders’ idea of private property rights, addressing the claim that they were only interested in protecting the rights of the wealthy. The third and fourth chapters discuss colonial and early republican views on women and their roles in the family and society, and how these affect their civic involvement. The fifth chapter discusses how lawmakers of the early republic justified the requirement that citizens own property in order to vote. Chapter sixth looks at the founders’ ideas for social welfare and how the republic ought to help its impoverished citizens, possibly offering alternatives to the social programs incorporated in the last 100 years. Finally, the seventh chapter focuses on immigration, and how the Founders believed we ought to select who may have the privilege of becoming a U.S. citizen. Regardless of what you may think you know about the founding era and its leaders, this book is perhaps the most comprehensive refutation of the lies used ceaselessly to condemn America by way of discrediting her origins. It also serves into a nearly-complete guide to how Project 250 aims to reshape our beautiful republic.
Author: Dr. Thomas G. West
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997
ISBN 0-8476-8516-0, 9-780847-685165
The Ohio Farmer was not a real farmer, though he lived in Ohio at the time. The Ohio Farmer letters were a series of letters sent to the 112th U.S. Congress, a project led by Peter Schramm to attempt to remind our legislatures of their constitutional obligations to the people of the United States.The letters were collected into a book, but as of now Ashbrook does not print and sell this collection—we were lucky to catch the one copy between us, when Ashbrook was reorganizing their library, discarding duplicates and allowing students to claim them for their own libraries. Perhaps a rising public interest in the letters will lead to a new edition being printed. Until then, the letters can be viewed on the project’s website, archived on the Wayback Machine.
A staple of many Ashbrook courses on America. It is also offered to high schools who attend the Academy. It has a variety of speeches and writings from the Founding Era, to Antebellum, all the way to the Progressive era and the Civil Rights movement. Jefferson, Washington, Lincoln, Reagan, and even Calhoun and L. B. Johnson all have something of theirs included in this book. David Tucker, a former Ashbrook professor and rival to the original editor, compiled his own version of this book, with very few documents common between the two. The Tucker version is sold by Teaching American History, though Project 250 recommends the Burkett version if available. Perhaps when the day comes that people all over the nation know about the Ashbrook Center and wish to read the works put together by its faculty, the Center will make these books available to everyone.
Editor: Christopher C. Burkett; Publisher: Ashbrook Center, 2016; ISBN: 978-1-878802-26-2
Editor: David Tucker; Publisher: Ashbrook Center, 2013; ISBN: 978-1-878802-64-4
The Library of America publishes literature by Americans on various topics, from novels and short stories to essays, autobiographies, and letters. Although this volume is large, it contains all of Jefferson’s writings cited by Project 250 essayists and authors we refer our readers to, including the first draft of the Declaration of Independence, Notes on the State of Virginia, and his letters to John Holmes in 1820, Henry Lee in 1825, and Roger Weightman in 1826, among others. If you are skeptical of what secondary-source writers like West claim (as we all should be), and if you want to understand a man as he understood himself, a comprehensive book of that man’s writings is the best source from which to read his thoughts in full. Individual pieces, however, can be found online, and as with all other readings, when possible we will link to them wherever in our own writings the pieces are mentioned and cited.
Author: Thomas Jefferson
Publisher: Library of America, 1984
Editor: Merrill D. Peterson
ISBN: 0-940450-16-x, 9-780940-450165
Editor: W. B. Allen; Publisher: Liberty Fund, 1988; ISBN: 978-0-86597-060-1
Editor: George W. Carey, James McClellan; Publisher: Liberty Fund, 2001; ISBN: 978-0-86597-289-6
Editor: Clinton Rossiter, Notes and Introduction by Charles R. Kesler; Publisher: Signet Classics, 1961; ISBN: 0-451-52881-6, 0-71149-00795-3
Although this pair of works was written by an Englishman hiding in the Netherlands, I put the Treatises in the American list simply because of the impact Lockean philosophy had on early American thinkers. Locke has been repeatedly in several Ashbrook courses, especially regarding his theory on the State of Nature in American History before 1865, and his ideas on executive prerogative in American Political Thought I.
A link to order this book will be added when found.
Editor: Gordon Lloyd; Publisher: Ashbrook Center, 2014; ISBN: 978-1878802-30-9