Jefferson’s Mind, Spalding’s Commentary

Jefferson’s Mind, Spalding’s Commentary

Matthew Spalding, the Kirby Professor in Constitutional Government and Dean of the Van Andel Graduate School of Government at Hillsdale College, welcomes the Semiquincentennial bearing not a narrative history of 1776 so much as an extended meditation on a single paragraph-by-paragraph performance: a reading-in-real-time of the document that, in his telling, gave America its mind before it gave it a country.“The Making of the American Mind,” winn…