Michael Barone | Mental Maps of the Founders

Michael Barone is the senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, a resident fellow emeritus at the American Enterprise Institute, author of Mental Maps of the Founders, and the longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics.

The Founding Fathers were men of high intellect, steely integrity, and enormous ambition—but they were not all of one mind. They came from particular places in already diverse colonies, and they all sought their futures in different horizons. Without reliable maps of even nearby terrain, they contributed in different, and sometimes conflicting, ways to the expansion of a young republic on the seaboard edge of a continent of whose vast expanses they were largely ignorant.

Mental Maps of the Founders explores the geographic orientation—the mental maps—of six of the Founders. Three were Virginians, who vied to expand their new nation toward different points of the compass.