Alexander Hamilton and the Persistence of Myth.

By Stephen F. Knott Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002. Pp. 344. $34.95 cloth.

Since the publication of Forrest McDonald's biography of Alexander Hamilton in 1982, a wave has been rising in favor of the first secretary of the Treasury among conservative and neoconservative scholars. That wave, however, bucks a powerful tide of public and academic opinion that generally has flowed in the opposite direction. The history of that tide is the subject of an intriguing new book.

Stephen F. Knott has written an important extended historiography of the scholarly and political reputation of Alexander Hamilton from his untimely death at the hands of Aaron Burr to the present. It is a story well worth telling, and Knott makes valuable points about accuracy and bias in schol...

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