A digital book talk with R.B. Bernstein, Lecturer in Law and Politics at the City College of New York from December 15, 2020. Recording available.
In a new take on the second President of the United States, The Education of John Adams by R.B. Bernstein explores Adams’ flourishing legal career and the impact that law had on him, his perception of himself, and his role in defining and expounding ideas about constitutionalism and how it should work as the governing ideology of the new United States.
Bernstein traces Adams’ part in launching the government of the United States under the U.S. Constitution; his service as the nation's first vice president and second president; and his retirement years, during which he was first a vexed and rejected ex-president and then became the revered "Sage of Braintree."
Bernstein establishes Adams as a key figure in the evolution of American constitutional theory and practice. And, The Education of John Adams is the first biography to examine Adams's conflicted and hesitant ideas about slavery and race in the American context, raising serious questions about his mythic status as a friend of human equality and a foe of slavery.
Pulling from Adams’ own words—in diaries, letters, essays, pamphlets, and books, The Education of John Adams re-examines the often-debated question of the relevance of Adams's thought to our own time.
R. B. Bernstein is Lecturer in Law and Politics at the City College of New York, where he has taught since 2011; he is also a distinguished adjunct professor of law at New York Law School, where he has taught since 1991. An expert on the American Revolution, the origins of the Constitution, and the early republic, he is a graduate of Amherst College and Harvard Law School and did his graduate work in history at New York University. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.
