IN-PERSON: John Marshall: The Final Founder with Robert Strauss (Book Talk)

Tuesday, August 17, 5:30-7:00 p.m. EST

About John Marshall: The Final Founder

Eighteenth- and 19th-century contemporaries believed Marshall to be, if not the equal of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, at least very close to that pantheon.

John Marshall: The Final Founder demonstrates that not only can Marshall be considered one of those Founding Fathers, but that what he did as the Chief Justice was not just significant, but the glue that held the union together after the original founding days. The Supreme Court met in the basement of the new Capitol building in Washington when Marshall took over, which is just about what the executive and legislative branches thought of the judiciary.

John Marshall: The Final Founder advocates a change in the view of when the “founding” of the United States ended. That has long been thought of in one or the other of the signing of the Constitution, the acceptance of the Bill of Rights or the beginning of the Washington presidency. The Final Founder pushes that forward to the peaceful change of power from Federalist to Democrat-Republican and, especially, Marshall’s singular achievement — to move the Court from the basement and truly make it Supreme.

About the Author

Strauss sees history not as dull and turgid, but fun and entertaining.  His new book treats biography and the American history essays it inspires to be a search through not just the stolid facts, but also a way to imagine history, as the word inside it, “story.”

Strauss has been a reporter for Sports Illustrated, a feature writer for the Philadelphia Daily News, a news and sports producer for KYW-TV and a longtime adjunct in non-fiction writing at the University of Pennsylvania.  For the last two decades, he has been a freelance writer, with his main client being the New York Times, where he has had more than 1000 bylines.  He is the author of three books: “Daddy’s Little Goalie,” a funny and sentimental memoir about being the dad of girl athletes; “Worst. President. Ever.,” a biography of James Buchanan, which won the 2017 Gold Medal for Biography from the Independent Publishers Association; and “John Marshall: The Final Founder.”  He lives in Haddonfield, New Jersey.

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