Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America, by Jack Rakove
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010
442 pages plus acknowledgments, notes, further reading and index. No photos.
Library: 973.3 RAK
Description:
In the early 1770s, the men who ivented America were living quiet, provincial lives in the rustic bakwateres of the New World, devoted primarily to family, craft, and the private pursuit of wealth and happiness. None set out to become "revolutionary" by ambition, but when events in Boston escalated, they found themselves thrust into a crisis that moved, in a matter of months, fromn protest to war.
In this remarkable book, the historian Jack Rakove shows how the private lives of these men were suddenly transformed into public careers-how Washington became a strategist, Franklin a pioneering cultural diplomat, Madison a sophisticated cultural thinker, and Hamilton a brilliant policy maker.
Rakove shakes off accepted notions of these men as godlike visionaries, focusing instead on the evolution of their ideas and the crystallizing of their purposes. In Revolutionaries, we see the founders before they were fully formed leaders,
as individuals whose lives were radically altered by the explosive events of the mid 1770s. They were ordinary men who became extraordinary-a transformation that finally has the literary treatment it deserves.
Spanning the two crucial decades of the country's birth, from 1773 to 1792, Revolutionaries uses little-known stories of these famous (and not so famous) men to capture-in a way no single biography ever could-the intensely creative period of the republic's founding.
From the Boston Tea Party to the First Continental Congress, from Trenton to Valley Forge, from the ratification of the Constitution to the disputes that led to our two-party system, Rakove explores the competing views of politics, war, diplomacy, and society that shaped our nation.
Thoughtful, clear-minded and persuasive, Revolutionaries is a majestic blend of narrative and intellectual history, one of those rare books that makes us think afresh about how the country came to be, and why the idea of America endurse.
Table of Contents
Prologue: The World Beyond Worcester
Part I: The Crisis
1. Advocates for the Cause
2. The REvolt of the Moderates
3. The Character of a general
Part II: Challenges
4. The First Constitution Makers
5. Vain Liberators
6. The Diplomats
Part III: The Legacies
7. The Optimist Abroad
8. The Greatest Lawgiver in Modernity
9. The State Builder
Acknowledgments
Notes
Sources and Further REading
Index
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