Because my expertise is in early American history, I will concentrate on Larry Kramer’s portrait of pre-Revolutionary popular constitutionalism, which acts as a baseline against which to measure nineteenth-century developments. Before examining pre-Revolutionary constitutionalism, however, I want to note two features of Kramer’s style of historical argument that make the book a particularly sop...

IT is difficult to imagine a case more deserving of detailed historical analysis than that of John Roberton (1776-1840), a surgeon who practised as a specialist in the treatment of venereal disease in two European capitals' yet is linked to a subject, medical police, which, on close examination, occupied a fraction of his known professional life. Despite his widely published popular works on ve...