Few contemporary historians have been as prolific as Forrest McDonald, and few have created so much debate within the discipline. From 1957, when his account of the Wisconsin utilities industry was published, to today, when he is investigating Southern ethnicity, McDonald's career has been one long exercise in demythologizing. Unlike so many of his colleagues, he has not been known politically as either a liberal or a radical. Rather, he has long been unabashedly a conservative, one who in 1964 served as state chairman of the Goldwater for President Committee of Rhode Island and who since 1978 has been listed on the masthead of National Review.

McDonald's major works have challenged stereotypes of predatory and indifferent industrialists, have replaced Charles A. Beard's simplistic economic interpretation of the Constitution with a far more intricate one of his own, and have juxtaposed a rather stupid George Washington and a rather destructive Thomas Jefferson...