Fallen Founder : The Life of Aaron Burr

A controversial challenge to the works of Ron Chernow and David McCullough With Fallen Founder, Nancy Isenberg plumbs rare and obscure sources to shed new light on everyone’s favorite founding villain. The Aaron Burr whom we meet through Isenberg’s eye-opening biography is a feminist, an Enlightenment figure on par with Jefferson, a patriot, and—most importantly—a man with powerful enemies in an age of vitriolic political fighting. Revealing the gritty reality of eighteenth-century America, Fallen Founder is the authoritative restoration of a figure who ran afoul of history and a much-needed antidote to the hagiography of the revolutionary era.

Nancy Isenberg is the Mary Frances Barnard Chair in nineteenth-century American history at the University of Tulsa. She is the author of Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America, which was chosen as the best book in the field for 1999 by the Society of Historians of the Early American Republic.