Forrest McDonald was born in Orange, Texas on January 7, 1927. He graduated from the University of Texas at Austin and received a doctorate there in 1955. He taught history at Brown University, Wayne State University, and the University of Alabama, where he retired in 2002. He wrote more than a dozen books including Novus Ordo Seclorum: The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution, The American Presidency: An Intellectual History, and biographies of Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. He died of heart failure on January 19, 2016 at the age of 89.
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