A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America's First Presidential Campaign

8vo 335 pages. Edward John Larson (born September 21, 1953) is an American historian and legal scholar. He is university professor of history and holds the Hugh & Hazel Darling Chair in Law at Pepperdine University. He was formerly Richard B. Russell Professor of American History at the University of Georgia. He continues to serve as a senior fellow of the University of Georgia's Institute of Higher Education, and is currently a professor at Pepperdine School of Law, where he teaches several classes. His articles have appeared in Nature, Scientific American, The Nation, American History, Time, and various academic history and law journals. Larson received the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for History for his book Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion. "They could write like angels and scheme like demons." So begins Pulitzer Prize-winner Edward Larson's masterful account of the wild ride that was the 1800 presidential election an election so convulsive and so momentous to the future of American democracy that Thomas Jefferson would later dub it "America's second revolution." This was America's first true presidential campaign, giving birth to our two-party system and etching the lines of partisanship that have shaped American politics ever since. The contest featured two of our most beloved Founding Fathers, facing off as the heads of their two still-forming parties--the sharp-minded John Adams, and the enigmatic Thomas Jefferson. Adams and his elitist Federalists would squelch liberty and impose a British-style monarchy; Jefferson and his radically democratizing Republicans would throw the country into chaos. Other founders joined the fray James Madison, James Monroe, John Marshall, and even George Washington. Drawing on unprecedented, meticulous research of the day-to-day unfolding drama, from diaries and letters of the principal players as well as accounts in the fast-evolving partisan press.