“The Constitution and the Federalist Papers”

Please note that the series package includes all 7 lectures taking place every Monday from January 26 to March 9, 2026. Tickets for single lectures will be available beginning December 1, 2025

​The thirteen little republics that replaced the thirteen colonies were so vulnerable that a group of influential Americans worked to create a viable national government in the late 1780s. James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, with the full support of George Washington, drafted and defended the Constitution, then sent it to the states for ratification. Their Federalist articles aimed to persuade citizens of the states that the republic would be strong enough to defend them without becoming another alien imposition of the British type.

Dr. Patrick Allitt is the Cahoon Family Professor of American History at Emory University.  He was born and raised in England, was an undergraduate at Oxford, a PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley, and has taught at Emory since 1988. He is the author of seven books, most recently A Climate of Crisis: America in the Age of Environmentalism (Penguin, 2014). He is also the presenter of twelve video and audio lecture series with “The Great Courses,” most recently How Railways Transformed the World (2024).