David N. Gellman interviews Jesse Wegman on The Lost Founder: James Wilson and the Forgotten Fight for a People’s Constitution (Celadon Books, 2026).

Jesse Wegman tells the story of James Wilson, a Founding Father whose bold vision shaped American democracy but whose legacy was lost to scandal.

As a young lawyer, James Wilson made a celebrated case for American independence in an essay that inspired the famous words “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” He went on to write the first draft of the Constitution and, along with the more famous James Madison, played perhaps the essential role in its ultimate creation.

Wilson believed that in a democracy, the people were the ultimate source of all power. He argued successfully for a strong central government and a powerful presidency and unsuccessfully for a president elected by popular vote and a Senate apportioned by population. He was recognized for his ideas and leadership. But only a decade after the Constitution was ratified, he died of malaria in the back room of a North Carolina tavern while hiding from his creditors.

Instead of going down as one of the nation’s great political thinkers, Wilson was virtually written out of history. But in The Lost Founder, Wegman brings to life the most prescient of the earliest patriots and makes a convincing argument that scandal should not diminish the life and relevance of a brilliant, complicated man whose vision for his country could not be more relevant today.

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When the founding fathers of the United States inaugurated a system of government that was unprecedented in the modern world, they knew that a functioning democracy required an educated electorate capable of making rational decisions. But who would validate the information that influenced citizens’ opinions? By spotlighting various institutions of learning in Creating an Informed Citizenry: Knowledge and Democracy in the Early American Republic (U Virginia Press, 2025), George Oberle provides a comprehensive look at how knowledge was created, circulated, and consumed in the early American republic.

Many of the founders, including George Washington, initially favored the creation of a centralized national university to educate Americans from all backgrounds. Over the first half of the nineteenth century, however, politicians moved away from any notion of publicly educated laypeople generating useful knowledge. The federal government ultimately founded the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, to be run by experts only. Oberle’s insightful analysis of the competing ideas over the nature of education offers food for thought as we continue to grapple with a rapidly evolving media landscape amid contested meanings of knowledge, expertise, and the obligations of citizenship.

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The Centrality of Slavery: Empire and Enslavement in Colonial Illinois and Missouri (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025) examines how French and American colonizers used the powers of various imperial regimes to create slave societies in present-day Missouri and Illinois from the 1720s through the 1820s. The first book-length study of slavery and empire in both Illinois and Missouri, it begins with the origins of Native American and African American enslavement in the region. It then traces how successive French, Spanish, British, and American regimes shaped the development of slavery over the course of a century, examines the significance of the Northwest Ordinance’s ban on slavery in Illinois, and then analyzes the diverging histories of slavery in Illinois and Missouri in the early 1800s. The book concludes with an analysis of the Missouri Crisis and the compromise of 1820, along with the Middle Mississippi Valley’s significance in the road towards disunion and civil war in the late 1850s.

More broadly, The Centrality of Slavery argues that the Middle Mississippi Valley sat astride the crossroads of imperial North America. The practices of empire and enslavement forged and fought over there exerted an outsized influence on the history of slavery in North America and the United States. Rather than treating the region’s eighteenth-century past as a prologue to the rise of the United States, John Craig Hammond analyzes the colonial history of the region on its own terms, through the European colonizers, American settlers, and enslaved people of Indigenous and African descent who shaped the development of slavery in the Middle Mississippi Valley.

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