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Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
May 2010
On Sale: May 11, 2010
496 pages
ISBN: 0618267468
EAN: 9780618267460
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
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, the historian Jack Rakove shows how the
private lives of these men were suddenly transformed into
public careershow 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.
InRevolutionaries, we see the foundersbeforethey 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 extraordinarya transformation that
finally has the literary treatment it deserves.Spanning the
two crucial decades of the country's birth, from 1773 to
1792,Revolutionariesuses little-known stories of these
famous (and not so famous) men to capturein a way no single
biography ever couldthe 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,Revolutionariesis 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.
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