Expected Release: April 2025

The American Founders and Framers were educated in the Scholastic tradition of the Middle Ages. This rigorous method of education thrived in the English and European universities which inspired America’s first colleges. Our reprint of James J. Walsh’s remarkable study, published by Fordham University Press in 1935, shows that the founding principles set forth in 1776 and codified in the U.S. Constitution have their source in the Catholic tradition of intellectual inquiry.

The NCBC reprint edition contains a new introduction by Edward J. Furton, a new foreword by John M. Peterson, and a new afterword by Jason T. Eberl. Facsimiles of colonial commencement thesis broadsheets printed in the original edition have been digitally refined. Walsh’s complete text is re-typeset with marginal annotations indexing the pagination of the 1935 Fordham edition, for ease of scholarly citation.