scholar put it. Without a college education, he did not write innovative scholarship, and he shows no knowledge of the scholarly journals containing historical research. But he read widely, including when appropriate old newspapers and archival material, and gives references in footnotes. History was for Bowers the story of personalities, and men were either heroes or villains. This was politics. "He early interpreted American history as a contest between privilege and democracy". He was "an historian of crisis, choosing his themes from the 'critical periods' of history: the triumph of democracy over aristocracy in the Jackson period, the epochal conflict of Jefferson and Hamilton, the retrograde decade after the Civil War, the election and administrations of Jefferson, and an act from the French drama of 1789." In a review, historian William O. Lynch, also from Indiana, described Bowers in 1929 as "close to being an able historian". But "a more restrained style, more pro and con in the discussion of problems and men, and fewer unqualified opinions would vastly improve the works of this near-brilliant author." Unsophisticated readers need "protection against writers of the school of Mr. Bowers". Lynch predicted that Bowers' "harmful" histories would not be enduring works: "[T]he volumes of Mr. Bowers would be much sounder, live longer and do less harm, had he understood that it is not so much the business of the historian to blame and praise, as to explain political leaders. Neither is it the chief business of the historian to drive his own interpretations into the minds of his readers with the most forceful English that he can command, but instead to present the truth clearly leaving his readers free to form their own conclusions in the presence of the evidence impartially stated. Within these limits, an engaging style should not be despised but welcomed. Thomas Jefferson Bowers' enormously popular books Party Battles of the Jackson Period (1922) and Jefferson and Hamilton: The Struggle for Democracy in America (1925) are critical of the Federalist Party, the Whig Party, and the Republican Party as bastions of aristocracy. Jefferson and Hamilton builds on the documentary evidence and analysis of Charles A. Beard's Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy. He discusses the operations of Hamilton as Secretary of the Treasury in Washington's first administration. Hamilton worked on behalf of financial speculators, including at least two dozen members of Congress, to fund depreciated debts at their full face