"Taken together, these essays constitute a better summing up--part critique, part appreciation--than anything else in print of work done in any field of American history. Nowhere else can we learn so easily and so well what to read about colonial America. . . . A very useful volume of considerable distinction."--William Abbott, editor, "The Papers of George Washington."

No competing edition of The Federalist offers nearly as much help in grasping Publius' arguments in defense of the new but unratified United States Constitution of 1787 as this new annotated edition by J. R. Pole. Essay by essay--with ample cross-references and glosses on 18th-century linguistic usage--Pole's commentary lays bare the intellectual background and assumptions of Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay; explicates and critiques The Federalist's central concepts, rhetorical strategies, and arguments; and points up the international, national, and local facts on the ground relevant to Confederation Era New Yorkers, the constituency to which The Federalist was originally addressed. Pole's Introduction, a brief chronology of political events from 1688 to 1791, a brief overview of the themes of the essays, the text of the Constitution cross-referenced to The Federalist , and an index of proper names, concepts, and themes that also functions as a glossary further distinguish this edition.

This book is a study in the history of political communication. Today we take it for granted that the people of a democracy have a right to know how their representatives speak and vote. But in the period of the American Revolution this development was new in both Britain and America. No assembly debates were reported in the colonial press; the constitutional convention of 1787 notoriously met in secret; even the U.S. senate kept its doors closed for its first decade. In Britain parliamentary debates were officially secret until reporting was increasingly but unofficially tolerated due to the pressure of public interest in the same period. Members of Parliament increasingly had their speeches printed for public consumption.In 1803 the Speaker set a gallery aside for the press reporters.

J. R. Pole shows that similar forces worked to bring about these profound changes in the concept of political accountability in both the new American republic and the republican aspects of the British mixed monarchy.