Douglass Adair

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Douglass Adair (died May 2, 1968) was an American historian and historiographer. He attended the University of the South, Harvard University, and Yale University, and taught at Princeton University and the College of William and Mary. He is particularly noted for his work in researching the authorship of disputed numbers of the Federalist Papers, and work in the historiography of republicanism in general. Adair's 1943 work The Intellectual Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy, which formed his dissertation at Yale, was important in rejecting the work of Charles A. Beard and asserting that ideas derived from the framework of Western philosophy had played a crucial role in the early development of the United States. Though unpublished until the end of the century, the list of those who borrowed it from Yale's library is described as a "who's who in early American history." He committed suicide in 1968.