Rebecca Burgess serves as editor and associate scholar with the Classics of Strategy and Diplomacy project. Additionally, Burgess is a 2021 National Security Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. She’s an Advisory Board Member of Combined Arms and of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation/Monticello, and is a participant in the Bush Institute’s Stand-To Veterans Task Force. Burgess researches the political and social institutions of democratic governance, including civics and national security, civil-military relations and the military life cycle, veterans and politics, and the political theory of empire. She has nearly two decades of combined public policy, administrative, and academic experience, holding the position most recently as a research fellow both in Foreign and Defense Policy and Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Her work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Economist, Military Times, Newsweek, and The American Interest, among others. She is the co-editor, with Gary J. Schmitt, of McCulloch v. Maryland at 200: Debating John Marshall’s Jurisprudence (American Enterprise Institute, 2020).
Rebecca Burgess serves as editor and associate scholar with the Classics of Strategy and Diplomacy project. Additionally, Burgess is a 2021 National Security Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. She’s an Advisory Board Member of Combined Arms and of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation/Monticello, and is a participant in the Bush Institute’s Stand-To Veterans Task Force. Burgess researches the political and social institutions of democratic governance, including civics and national security, civil-military relations and the military life cycle, veterans and politics, and the political theory of empire. She has nearly two decades of combined public policy, administrative, and academic experience, holding the position most recently as a research fellow both in Foreign and Defense Policy and Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Her work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Economist, Military Times, Newsweek, and The American Interest, among others. She is the co-editor, with Gary J. Schmitt, of McCulloch v. Maryland at 200: Debating John Marshall’s Jurisprudence (American Enterprise Institute, 2020).
It is with great sadness that we write to let you know that CSD founder and executive director Dr. Patrick Garrity passed away peacefully after a long battle with skin cancer. Right up until the end, he devoted his time and thoughts to his life’s work, attending to his John Quincy Adams essay, the work of future scholars, and outreach for his beloved CSD.
To get to July 4, 1776, required no small amount of strategic thinking, of prudent statesmanship, of expert melding together of situational awareness, rhetorical prowess, alliance-leveraging, and political maneuverings. Jefferson was acutely aware that among the American colonial politicians of his day, there was an “inequality of pace with which [they] moved” towards the end goal of political independence from Great Britain, and that therefore a great “prudence [was] required to keep front and rear together,” for them ever to hope to be successful in the undertaking. How Jefferson and the more zealous members of his set built up to the Declaration of Independence is arguably a masterclass in statecraft, with publication of Jefferson’s Summary View as their opening move.