Opening paragraphs...................

Political passions fade with time, leaving their pale shadows to be recovered by historians who usually affect an objective, if not amused, detachment from them.  American politics have seldom generated the fierceness of passion that they did in their first decade.  The extravagant exchanges in the contests between Federalists and Republicans in the late 1790's seem today so to exceed the issues as to merit the patronizing dismissal that scholars have generally given them.  After all, the nation survived, President John Adams did not secure the crown to which he allegedly aspired, and President Thomas Jefferson succeeded him without bloodshed.  Accordingly, the dire predictions of tyranny by journalists like Benjamin Franklin Bache and William Duane in their notorious newspaper, the Aurora, have become mere curiosities, extreme examples of the bad manners that political contests so often provoke.
-Edmund S. Morgan, from the Foreword to Richard N. Rosenfeld's American Aurora


It was a special time in the history of America.  The Vice President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, called it "a reign of witches."
-Richard N. Rosenfeld,  American Aurora