Jack N. Rakove

Jack Rakove is the W. R. Coe Professor of History and American Studies, and Professor of Political Science at Stanford University, where he has taught since 1980. He was educated at Haverford College, where he earned a B.A. in History in 1968, Edinburgh University, and Harvard, where he received his Ph.D. in History in 1975 and studied under Bernard Bailyn. Before coming to Stanford, he taught at Colgate University from 1975-1980. At Stanford he teaches courses in early American history and the origins and interpretation of the Constitution.



He is the author of four books: The Beginnings of National Politics: An Interpretive History of the Continental Congress (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1979); James Madison and the Creation of the American Republic (revised edition, Addison, Wesley, Longman, 2001, 2006); Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1996), which won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize in History, the 1997 Fraunces Tavern Museum Book Award, and the 1998 Society of the Cincinnati Book Prize; and Declaring Rights: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford Books, 1997). He is the editor of Interpreting the Constitution: The Debate over Original Intent (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990); James Madison: Writings (New York: Library of America, September 1999); a collection of scholarly essays on The Unfinished Election of 2000 (New York: Basic Books, 2001); and The Federalist: The Essential Essays (Boston: Bedford Books, 2003). He has contributed chapters to numerous scholarly collections, and written essays for various law reviews, including the Stanford Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review, Yale Law Journal, and Yale Journal of Law and Humanities. He has also published numerous op-ed articles in such newspapers as the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, and New York Times. In November 1998 he testified at the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee hearings on the Background and History of Impeachment. He has served as a consultant and expert witness in several cases involving Indian land claims in New York State dating to the 1780s. He has also been involved with various media projects, including Dateline ‘87, a fourteen-episode radio program on the Constitutional Convention; Liberty’s Kids, a forty-episode animated cartoon history of the American Revolution produced by DIC Entertainment in beautiful downtown Burbank, California for PBS; and Whose Curse Is Worse: The Red Sox and Cubs on Trial, which aired on ESPN in September 2004.

In 2003-2004, Rakove was president of the Society for the History of the Early American Republic. He has also served on the Council of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture in Williamsburg. He has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1999 and was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2007. During 2006-2007, he was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford.



Professor Rakove’s research continues to revolve around the era of the American Revolution and the adoption of the Constitution. His current project is a book entitled "Revolutionaries: Inventing an American Nation, 1773-1791", to be published by Houghton, Mifflin in 2008 or 2009. His next book after that is "Beyond Belief, Beyond Conscience: The Radical Significance of the Free Exercise of Religion", to be published by Oxford University Press as part of its new series on Unalienable Rights.



Rakove lives on the Stanford campus with his wife, Helen, an attorney at Hoge, Fenton, Jones and Appel in San Jose. Their older son, Rob, graduated from Stanford and is completing a Ph.D. in American history at the University of Virginia. Their younger son, Dan, graduated from Princeton and will be a student at the John F. Kennedy School at Harvard starting in the fall of 2007.

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