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One of the finest historians of her generation, Jan Ellen Lewis transformed our understanding of the early U.S. Republic. Her groundbreaking essays defined the emerging fields of gender and emotions history and reframed traditional understandings of the founding fathers and the U.S. Constitution. As significant as her work was within each of these subfields, her most remarkable insights came from the connections she drew among them. Gender and race, slavery and freedom, feelings and politics ran together in the hearts, minds, and lives of the men and women she studied. Lewis’s brilliant research revealed these long-buried connections and illuminated their importance for America’s past and present.

Family, Slavery, and Love in the Early American Republic collects thirteen of Lewis’s most important essays. Distinguished scholars shed light on the historical and historiographical contexts in which Lewis and her peers researched, wrote, and argued. But the real star of this volume is Lewis herself: confident, unconventional, erudite, and deeply imaginative.

Jan Ellen Lewis (1949-2018) was professor of history at Rutgers-Newark University, where she also served as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. The author of multiple books and articles on gender, race, and politics in the early republic, she served as the 36th president of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic.

Barry Bienstock teaches history at Horace Mann School, Bronx, New York.

Annette Gordon-Reed is Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard Law School.

Peter S. Onuf is Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor of History, Emeritus at the University of Virginia and Senior Fellow at Monticello’s Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies.

"An indefatigable researcher and a masterful essayist, Jan Lewis revealed how gender, slavery, and emotions converged within the early Republic’s political experiment and showed us why that convergence mattered.  Like a well-curated retrospective exhibit, this collection displays Lewis’s creative and wide-ranging reinterpretation of the founding era."
--John Lauritz Larson, Purdue University

“Learned, lucid, insightful, and humane, these essays aptly reflect Jan’s qualities as an inspirational mentor and pathbreaking scholar with a dazzling range of expertise. They collectively remind us of how much we have lost with her passing.”
--Alan Taylor, author of American Republics

“When Lewis began her career, the early American Republic was a moribund field; this volume shows us the magic by which she brought it back to life. Field changing when it was first published, her work has maintained its relevance ever since.”
--Serena Zabin, Carleton College