Wood's exhaustive research reveals a chain of documentary evidence that shows that the "many heads & many hands" who shaped the Constitution deemed nullification an integral part of an evolving understanding of federalism and the concept of checks and balances. The product of 35 years of meticulous scholarship on the early Republic, Nullification lays bare the fallacies of modern revisionist arguments that deny what the Founding Fathers understood to be an inherent application of states' rights.

Volume I was published in 2008; the second in March 2009 (see descriptions of each volume below). The remaining volume is in progress and, with the generous support of University Press of America, will be published in 2014.

Volume I: James Madison, Not The Father Of The Constitution
Other Framers, Different Intentions And The Origins Of Nullification, 1776-1787
University Press of America, 2008

Volume I contends that Nullification was an American – and not a Southern, or sectional – principle of republican and federal government. The key to this revolutionary new insight is none other than the Notes of Debates of James Madison. With original intentions still being debated today and in some cases denied, perhaps it is time to recover what the founders and framers intended originally and deal with history versus myth.

Volume II: James Madison and the Constitutionality of Nullification, 1787-1828
University Press of America, 2009

This book asks the questions: if nullification was constitutional and an American not Southern or sectional principle of republican and federal government, what happened to it? How did it come to be viewed as something unconstitutional, sinister, and even disunionist? This second volume of Nullification, A Constitutional History is the first to answer this critical question.

After tracing the origins of the first and second nullification movements in America (Virginia in the 1790s and New England from 1808 to 1815) and characterizing them both to be defenses of the republic and its federal, not national character (with nullification as a constitutional veto or negative given to the states for the preservation of their reserved rights), the early rejection of nullification as an original intention is then explained.