Hamilton: Visionary of the Early Republic

Steve Knott
Dr. Stephen Knott is the author of Alexander Hamilton & the Persistence of Myth and Washington & Hamilton: The Alliance that Forged America. He is an Emeritus Professor of National Security Affairs at the United States Naval War College in Newport, RI. Prior to accepting his position at the Naval War College, Knott was Co-Chair of the Presidential Oral History Program at the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. His essays have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, The New York Post, Time, Politico, The Hill, Foreign Policy, and The National Interest. He is the author/editor of ten books dealing with the American presidency, the early republic, and American foreign policy, including his most recently published book Coming to Terms with John F. Kennedy and the forthcoming Conspirator in Chief: The Long Tradition of Conspiracy Theories in the American Presidency. 

Richard Brookhiser
For twenty years (1987-2007) Richard Brookhiser wrote a column for the New York Observer. He also free-lanced for a number of magazines including The New Yorker, Cosmopolitan, Commentary, and Vanity Fair. He wrote about Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton, Iowa caucuses and national conventions, Philip Larkin and Bobby Short, the collapse of Communism and 9/11. Ronald Reagan laughed at one of his jokes; Margaret Thatcher repeated it. He shook Fidel Castro’s hand and had a close, sometimes tumultuous relationship with William F. Buckley, Jr. (which is the subject of Right Time, Right Place). Along the way he became a historian of the founding period. After writing about modern politicians, it didn’t seem a stretch to write about dead ones. “The founders are our fathers; they are also our contemporaries, present in so much of what we think and do.” He curated “Alexander Hamilton: The Man Who Made Modern America,” an exhibition at the New-York Historical Society; and wrote and hosted “Rediscovering George Washington” and “Rediscovering Alexander Hamilton,” films by Michael Pack which aired on PBS. He is currently a columnist for American History. In 2008 he was awarded the National Medal of the Humanities. In 2011 he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship. 

Richard Sylla
Dr. Richard Sylla is a Professor Emeritus of Economics and the former Henry Kaufman Professor of the History of Financial Institutions and Markets at New York University Stern School of Business. He is the author of several books, including Alexander Hamilton: The Illustrated Biography, Genealogy of American Finance, The American Capital Market and A History of Interest Rates. He is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Cliometric Society. He has received the Citibank Award for Excellence in Teaching, the Business History Conference Lifetime Achievement Award, National Science Foundation grants, and an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation grant. His writing has appeared in numerous publications, including the Journal of Economic History, Explorations in Economic History, Small Business In American Life and Business and Economic History. He has served on the editorial board of many journals that include Enterprise and Society, Economic and Financial History Abstracts, and Financial History. He served as President of the Economic History Association and the Business History Conference. He has been a member of the Board of Trustees of the Museum of American Finance since 2004 and served as Chairman of the Board from 2010-2020.  

Joanne B. Freeman  
Joanne Freeman is Professor of History at Yale University where she specializes in the politics and political culture of the revolutionary and early national periods of American History. Her most recent book, Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic, won the Best Book award from the Society of Historians of the Early American Republic, and her edited volume, Alexander Hamilton: Writings was one of the Atlantic Monthly’s “best books” of 2001. (It was one of the texts Lin Mauel Miranda used to write his Broadway musical.) Her current project, The Field of Blood: Congressional Violence in Antebellum America, explores physical violence in the U.S. Congress between 1830 and the Civil War. Freeman’s articles have appeared in a wide range of academic journals and popular press, and she has appeared in a host of documentaries on PBS and the History Channel, and in a number of radio programs for NPR and the BBC. She has done extensive work in the realm of public history, including co-curating museum exhibitions, acting as a historical consultant for documentary filmmakers, and giving frequent public lectures at venues such as the Smithsonian Museum of American History, the National Gallery of Art, and Colonial Williamsburg, among other places. She has also worked extensively with high school history teachers and students in workshops, lectures, and symposia around the nation.  In the last two years, she has worked as a historical consultant for the National Park Service in the reconstruction of the Alexander Hamilton Grange National Memorial. 

Douglas Ambrose
Professor Douglas Ambrose is an accomplished American historian specializing in early American political, legal, and social history. He serves as a faculty member at Hamilton College, where his teaching and scholarship focus on the founding era and the development of American institutions. Ambrose has built a strong reputation through both his monographs and editorial work, contributing to scholarly conversations about governance, law, and civil society in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. His publications include The Many Faces of Alexander Hamilton: The Life and Legacy of America’s Most Elusive Founding Father in 2006.