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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.



About the Author

Thomas A. Foster

Thomas A. Foster is on Twitter: @ThomasAFoster. He also posts on early American women's history here: www.facebook.com/WomeninEarlyAmerica and on Twitter: @EarlyAmWomen. Foster is Professor of History at DePaul University. He is the author of Sex and the Founding Fathers: The American Quest for a Relatable Past and Sex and the Eighteenth-Century Man: Massachusetts and the History of Sexuality in America. Foster is also editor of Long Before Stonewall: Histories of Same-Sex Sexuality; New Men: Manliness in Early America; Documenting Intimate Matters: Primary Sources for a History of Sexuality in America; and Women in Early America.



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