Temple University Press
Sex and the Founding Fathers: The American Quest for a Relatable Past
Key Metrics
- Thomas A Foster
- Temple University Press
- Hardcover
- 9781439911020
- 9.1 X 6.2 X 0.8 inches
- 1 pounds
- Biography & Autobiography > Historical
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
Biographers, journalists, and satirists have long used the subject of sex to define the masculine character and political authority of America's Founding Fathers. Tracing these commentaries on the Revolutionary Era's major political figures in Sex and the Founding Fathers, Thomas Foster shows how continual attempts to reveal the true character of these men instead exposes much more about Americans and American culture than about the Founders themselves.
Sex and the Founding Fathers examines the remarkable and varied assessments of the intimate lives of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and Gouverneur Morris from their own time to ours. Interpretations can change radically; consider how Jefferson has been variously idealized as a chaste widower, condemned as a child molester, and recently celebrated as a multicultural hero.
Foster considers the public and private images of these generally romanticized leaders to show how each generation uses them to reshape and reinforce American civic and national identity.
Author Bio
Thomas A. Foster is an associate dean for faculty affairs and a history professor at Howard University.
He is the author of Sex and the Eighteenth-Century Man: Massachusetts and the History of Sexuality in America and Sex and the Founding Fathers: The American Quest for a Relatable Past.
Thomas A. Foster is the author of Rethinking Rufus: Sexual Violations of Enslaved Men (2019); Sex and the Founding Fathers: The American Quest for a Relatable Past (2014); and Sex and the Eighteenth-Century Man: Massachusetts and the History of Sexuality in America (2006). He is the editor of Women in Early America (2015); Documenting Intimate Matters: Primary Sources for a History of Sexuality in America (2012); New Men: Manliness in Early America (2011); and Long Before Stonewall: Histories of Same-Sex Sexuality in Early America (2007).
Source: University of Georgia Press
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