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In my estimation, the best general survey is John Richard Alden’s _A History of the American Revolution_. It deals with the military, political, and diplomatic components of the story in a fascinating, reliably scholarly way. _1776_, like most of McCullough’s books, is popular with book buyers, but essentially pointless: he never tells you why you should care about the story he tells, or even what came of it. The book just starts and ends. If you want something more specific, please do say what it is. There are thousands of books on various aspects of the Revolution, and so you can read about any part of the story that you want.

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Congress was given power to regulate trade with foreign countries in part so that it could via adoption of tariffs discourage purchase of imports. This theme runs through James Madison’s correspondence for years before the Philadelphia Convention, and other framers shared this goal. The point of patent protection wasn’t to “tak[e] control of business,” but to encourage innovation — though some libertarian scholars today argue that intellectual property stifles innovation, and thus should not be protected.

Reference to original understanding — “the Founders” — is necessary if you subscribe to the Jeffersonian idea that the people’s will was expressed through the ratification process, and so their understanding is controlling. Many currently dispute this idea too, for various reasons.

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You’re welcome.

The most important thing about Federalist 39 is that Madison says that ratification was a federal act — which means that it was the act of separate states, each acting for itself. That ratification was federal, not national, permanently answers the question what kind of government the US Constitution created.

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One comment on your lesson (which is very interesting, by the way; I wish I had had such lessons in high school): it wasn’t the Framers who included a Bill of Rights in the Constitution. They in fact decided by a 10-0 vote of the states voting not to include one, which helps to explain why Mason and Randolph refused to sign. This omission helps to account for the skepticism of Federalists’ motives that shaped the ratification debate — and helped spur organization of the Jeffersonian Republican Party.

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You’re welcome.

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Of course, Randolph was the sponsor of the Virginia Plan in Philadelphia, as well as one of the five most voluble orators there.

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Besides that, as James Madison made clear in _The Federalist_, the meaning of the Constitution was not to be found in what was said in secret in the Philadelphia Convention, but in the explanation of the Constitution given to the people when they were considering whether to ratify it. In other words, it’s the ratification conventions, not the Philadelphia Convention, that count.

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The three chief Federalist spokesmen in the Richmond Convention were Governor Edmund Randolph, George Nicholas, and James Madison. Nicholas explained this point in great detail at the very end of the Convention — right before the vote on ratification. Randolph had already repeatedly made clear that the new government would have only the powers “expressly” delegated — which of course do not include power to put down secession, raise an army without calling Congress into session, ignore the chief justice’s writ of habeas corpus, conscript soldiers, print paper money, banish political opponents, etc. Besides that, Federalists assumed throughout the Convention that, as Edmund Pendleton explained in his speech accepting the presidency of the Convention at its very beginning, the Virginians were a people — not part of a people. This negates John Marshall’s contention in _McCulloch v. Maryland_ that the Constitution was ratified by one American people. As Nicholas put it, Virginia was to be as one of thirteen parties to a compact.

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Conor Cruise O’Brien’s biography of Edmund Burke is a good place to start.

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The controversy concerned his college lectures, in which he falsely claimed to have been in Vietnam as a soldier during the War. His _Passionate Sage_ is outstanding.

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There are numerous good books on John Adams. Among them are Ellis’s _Passionate Sage_ and Ferling’s _John Adams_. If you care about Adams as political thinker, C. Bradley Thompson’s _John Adams and the Spirit of Liberty_ is outstanding. Here’s my review of it:

http://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?a=254

McCullough’s Adams pulls off the astounding feat of considering Adams’s life in great detail without saying much of anything about his political thought. If for no other reason, that’s a sufficient cause to skip it.

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The Supreme Court seemed to say in _Missouri v. Holland_ that treaties took priority over the Constitution. The Court has recently seemed to go the opposite direction, however, in _Reid v. Covert_ (1957).

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You may be interested to know that in chapter 5 of _James Madison and the Making of America_, I show — what no other account of these events has ever mentioned — that Virginia Federalists — FEDERALISTS — said in the Virginia Ratification Convention that secession would be a state’s right under the proposed US Constitution.

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I would do it a different way: describe the Cabinet controversy over Hamilton’s Bank Bill, first in the House, then in the Cabinet. Then, tell them this remains the basic outline of constitutional disputation ever since. Throw in that Washington’s decision to have a Cabinet debate on his own treasury secretary’s favorite proposal reflects the very different conception of the presidency shared by the first six presidents. I think that giving the argument three famous faces (Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton) makes it far more memorable than straightforward talk about the Tenth Amendment — which describing Jefferson’s memo. allows you to work in anyway.

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Arash: Not Levin, Levinson. Sanford Levinson. HistoryGeek, you’ll find a link to the review in my comment above.

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