Political Moderation in America's First Two Centuries

Robert M. Calhoon is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. His books include The Loyalists in Revolutionary America, 1760–1781 (1973); Revolutionary America: An Interpretive Overview (1976); Evangelicals and Conservatives in the Early South, 1740–1861 (1988); and The Loyalist Perception and Other Essays (1989, Second Edition, 2008). He is also the founding editor of the on-line Journal of Backcountry Studies.

• 1. Augustan moderates: 'The precariousness of genuine civilization'; 2. Revolutionary moderates and the development of political character; 3. Ordered liberty in the Southern backcountry and the middle West; 4. Moderating moderation: denominational and primitive Christianity.

'Raymond Chandler observed that there are no dull subjects, only dull minds. Political moderation must seem the dullest of subjects, but in the hands of Robert Calhoon, a gifted historian, it emerges not only as illuminating history but as imperative for an understanding of our own tortured times.' Eugene D. Genovese, author of Roll Jordan Roll and Mind of the Master Class