Description:
Using concepts of historical geography, Rosemarie Zagarri examines how Americans' notions about space influenced the writing of the U.S. Constitution and the shaping of the nation's political institutions.
Brief description: Rosemarie Zagarri is Professor of History at George Mason University. She is the author of Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic and A Woman's Dilemma: Mercy Otis Warren and the American Revolution and the editor of David Humphreys' "Life of General Washington" with George Washington's "Remarks."
Review Quotes:
Historians have been puzzled for two hundred years about the causes of the famous large-versus-small-state controversy that erupted during that long, hot summer in Philadelphia and found its solution in the Great Compromise that made the Constitution possible.... Rosemarie Zagarri's book solves the mystery. She argues quite cogently that the politicians and citizens of 'the small' states retained an older system of corporate or community representation... while many in the large states with rapidly growing populations had concluded that a new system of representation, based on population instead of units, was a necessary response to change.
-- "Journal of American History"