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The Papers of James Madison: Secretary of State Series. Volume 5: 16 May-31 October 1803. Edited by David B. Mattern, J. C. A. Stagg, Ellen J. Barber, Anne Mandeville Colony, and Bradley J. Daigle. (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, c. 2000. Pp. xxxviii, 643. $70.00, ISBN 0-8139-1941-X.)
The Papers of James Madison: Secretary of State Series. Volume 6: 1 November 1803-3J March 1804. Edited by Mary A. Hackett, J. C. A. Stagg, Ellen J. Barber, Anne Mandeville Colony, and Angela Kreider. (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, c. 2002. Pp. xlii, 724. $70.00, ISBN 0-8139-2120-1.)
The Papers of James Madison: Presidential Series. Volume 5: 10 July 18127 February 1813. Edited by J. C. A. Stagg, Martha J. King, Ellen J. Barber, Anne Mandeville Colony, Angela Kreider, and Jewel L. Spangler. (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, c. 2004. Pp. xxxviii, 718. $70.00, ISBN 0-8139-2258-5.)
The publication of three volumes by the skilled and experienced editors at the University of Virginia is a sure sign of the flourishing state of Madison scholarship. These books and the eight earlier ones in these series, together with the seventeen volumes in the series covering to 1801, amount to twentyeight volumes. The project began forty-three years ago at the University of Chicago. At the present rate of publication, the Secretary of State Series will likely be about fifteen volumes in all. The Presidential Series, now about one-half completed, will likely run about twelve volumes total. The completion of these series in the now-foreseeable future, together with the retirement series now being planned-and likely to run to double-digit volumes-will make about fifty volumes in all. The Madison papers project has already transformed the quality of study about Madison and his times. For example, the series on Madison's sixteen years in executive office (together with the to-be-completed Thomas Jefferson papers for the same years) pretty well completes the need, as Irving Brant noted in my presence half-a-century ago, of rescuing Madison and the Jefferson-Madison administrations from the "two million disparaging words dumped on them by Henry Adams."
Volume 5...