Revolutionaries A New History of the Invention of America (Audible Audio Edition) Jack Rakove Bronson Pinchot Inc Blackstone Audio Books
Download As PDF : Revolutionaries A New History of the Invention of America (Audible Audio Edition) Jack Rakove Bronson Pinchot Inc Blackstone Audio Books
In the early 1770s, the men who invented America were living quiet, provincial lives in the rustic backwaters 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, from protest to war.
In this remarkable book, 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 constitutional thinker, and Hamilton a brilliant policymaker. Rakove shakes off accepted notions of these men as godlike visionaries, focusing instead on the evolution of their ideas and the crystallizing of their purpose. 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 endures.
Revolutionaries A New History of the Invention of America (Audible Audio Edition) Jack Rakove Bronson Pinchot Inc Blackstone Audio Books
For the better part of a century, Americans have alternated between idolizing the nation's revolutionary generation and muckraking it. One moment the revolutionaries are portrayed as demi-gods, the instruments of Divine Providence; the next moment, they are reactionaries, fighting to protect property and slavery.In Revolutionaries, Jack Rakove's beautifully written group portrait of the founding generations, they are placed where they belong: in their own time and their own place. Rakove shows how two generations of American provincials got swept up by history and came to make history of their own. And through their stories he delivers a smart and readable account of the revolutionary crisis, the war itself, the chaos of the 1780s, the making of the Constitution, and the first years of the early Republic. Each of the major players, from John Adams to Alexander Hamilton, come vividly to life in his account, with all their strengths and flaws. (And for those who have imbibed the John Adams worship of the last decade, Rakove's more nuanced account will be a particularly useful elixir.)
If you've always wanted to know something more about the revolutionary generation and its challenges than the cartoon versions offered by our politics and popular culture, Rakove's Revolutionaries is the perfect place to start.
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Revolutionaries A New History of the Invention of America (Audible Audio Edition) Jack Rakove Bronson Pinchot Inc Blackstone Audio Books Reviews
An educational experience. Provided new insights into issues and personalities not generally discussed in routine history writings. An excellent read.
This is an unusual look into our founding fathers. It deals with their thoughts, their relationships to one another, and attempts to discover what special talent they had that allowed them to rise to the occasion of the revolution and framing The Constitution. A perspective that is unusual and makes this a "Must Read".
well written with very interesting info about these personalities.
This is a delightfully fresh look at the founding fathers. From the outset, Rakove states that he wants to look at them not as men destined for holy greatness, but as completely typical of their milieu and times; the revolution, in this view, offered them as unique opportunity to distinguish themselves and set the country on a course they thought best - and many different directions were possible. This creates a stark contrast to the assumption behind most other treatments, i.e. that they were uniquely wise geniuses who had a mission to create exactly what they did to perfection. Nonetheless, he maintains that what they did accomplish - through negotiation, reflection, and compromise - was extraordinary.
In this way, you see Washington as a conventional plantation man, who had little military experience when compared to the professionals form Europe, yet grew into his role as generalissimo and then politician once the opportunity presented itself. Similarly, Franklin was a businessman and scientist, comfortable with England as his adopted home, but he transformed himself into a formidable diplomat, securing the indispensable commitment of Louis XVI to aid America militarily. Madison, Jefferson, Adams, and Hamilton receive the same treatment, with emphasis on their evolution as leaders and thinkers. Each of those founders - the colossuses of the revolution - is viewed from a different angle, that of how they developed professionally. It is fun and a great review of events that have settled too easily into myth.
Most interestingly, Rakove gives a great deal of space to lesser known figures, who had their own visions and ideas, some of what could have led to significantly different political outcomes. One of the most fascinating was the audacious John Laurens, the son of a plantation owner who advocated offering freedom and citizenship rights to slaves who fought for the revolutionary cause. He was an intimate of Hamilton and quite a firebrand. But there is also Dickinson, an early political celebrity whose career was fatally damaged by his refusal to advocate a break with Britain in 1776. He comes off very sympathically, as does Morris and Monroe.
However, it is not always easy to perceive where Rakove is headed or why he includes certain details. While he does address many of the central dilemmas of the time - the strange moral disapproval of slavery by slave-owners who had the power to do something about it and chose not to, for example - I felt that the book left me hanging in the end with more questions than answers. Of course, this ambiguity can be a plus, because it inspires me to read further, but I was expecting more of a resolution or even summing up than the author offers.
That being said, this is a truly new history on many might-have-beens. I will no doubt feel compelled to re-read this at a later date and may view it differently, so dense is the perspective and detail. Rakove is also a beautiful writer. Warmly recommended.
The great scholar and historian of the early American history, professor Jack Rakove, has succeeded in writing a history about the American Revolution and its major, although some less well-known, revolutionary characters. The success of this dense and scholarly, though a very much readable work lies in its successful fusion of a serious political and historical interpretation, and a narrative. It is therefore at once a fast-paced and lively narrative, coupled with an interpretive study of the revolutionary era and its major characters. Such a feat is usually difficult to pull off, but Jack Rakove succeeds where many others have and will continue to fail.
The book begins with a detailed narrative of the politics preceding the Revolution and events that led to the breakdown in relations between the colonies and Great Britain. The succeeding chapters are organized in a way that every chapter addresses particular facets and themes of the Revolutionary era through particular characters. The book contains a chapter about General G. Washington, J. Madison, T. Jefferson, A. Hamilton, B. Franklin/J. Adams/J. Jay, and lesser well-known figures like the Laurens family, Dickinson, Morris and several others.
There are 2 particular aspects of Jack Rakove as a historian and a scholar that make him great he is extremely detail-oriented and nuanced in his narrative and the accompanying political interpretation of events and characters; and he is genuinely neutral and objective in his interpretations and rarely, if ever, makes any definitive conclusions (let alone bold ones). These traits make him my absolute favorite historian!
I highly recommend this book to any student of history. Also, consider Jack Rakove's even more serious, Pulitzer Prize winning book http//www./Original-Meanings-Politics-Making-Constitution/dp/0679781218/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1358652050&sr=8-1&keywords=original+meanings
For the better part of a century, Americans have alternated between idolizing the nation's revolutionary generation and muckraking it. One moment the revolutionaries are portrayed as demi-gods, the instruments of Divine Providence; the next moment, they are reactionaries, fighting to protect property and slavery.
In Revolutionaries, Jack Rakove's beautifully written group portrait of the founding generations, they are placed where they belong in their own time and their own place. Rakove shows how two generations of American provincials got swept up by history and came to make history of their own. And through their stories he delivers a smart and readable account of the revolutionary crisis, the war itself, the chaos of the 1780s, the making of the Constitution, and the first years of the early Republic. Each of the major players, from John Adams to Alexander Hamilton, come vividly to life in his account, with all their strengths and flaws. (And for those who have imbibed the John Adams worship of the last decade, Rakove's more nuanced account will be a particularly useful elixir.)
If you've always wanted to know something more about the revolutionary generation and its challenges than the cartoon versions offered by our politics and popular culture, Rakove's Revolutionaries is the perfect place to start.
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