DAVID SIEMERS

Just before break, Choice sent me a copy of The Antifederalists: Men of Great Faith and Forebearance by David Siemers. My review was positive. If you're looking for a somewhat unconventional selection of antifederalist writings -- with a heavy emphasis on placing the antifederalists in both chronological and political contexts -- this collection might be for you. I say "unconventional" because Siemers includes -- sensibly, in my view -- selections from the notes on the Philadelphia convention and from the state ratifying conventions as well as the more traditional selections from the vigorous newspaper / pamphlet writings. This should allow students to trace antifederalist arguments from the beginning, as it were.

One thing that I particularly like about his collection is that Siemers attempts to give students a flavor of the wide variety of rhetorical practices that antifederalists used: he includes a few satirical and spurious pieces, for example. That's pretty cool. Unlike Storing, for example, Siemers does not seem to have been looking for the most theoretically rigorous articulations of antifederalist arguments, but his approach should allow students to get a good typology of the arguments that were actually presented and more or less widely disseminated at the time. And the collection is not only useful for students narrowly understood: I certainly learned a great deal about the progess of and divisions within antifederalist argument, and I spent only a short amount of time with the book.