THE FOUNDING FIRE Revolution, Independence, and the Birth of a Nation: AMERICAN CHRONICLES Volume I of X · 1776–1800 - Softcover

Inhaltsangabe

How does a republic survive being born?

In the spring of 1775, a ragged colonial militia fired on the most powerful army in the world. By the autumn of 1783, that militia had won. Within eight years, the men who led the fight had written a constitution that remains the law of the land 250 years later.

Nothing about it was inevitable.

The Founding Fire tells the full story of America's first twenty-five years — from the colonial crisis that forced a revolution to the Election of 1800 that proved the republic could survive one. It is the story of Washington holding an army together through impossible winters, of Madison designing a constitutional system in a sweltering Philadelphia summer, of Hamilton and Jefferson building the first American party system out of their mutual contempt, and of John Adams keeping the country out of a ruinous war at the cost of his own presidency.

It is also an honest reckoning with what the founding generation got wrong — the compromise over slavery that stored up a catastrophe, the exclusion of women and Native Americans from the republic they helped sustain, the gap between the Declaration's promise and the republic's performance that every subsequent generation has been left to close.

Written for the general reader who wants more than a textbook and less than a doctoral dissertation, The Founding Fire draws on the Founders' own letters, the congressional records, and the newspapers of the era to bring the founding generation to life — not as marble statues but as flawed, brilliant, quarrelsome human beings who somehow built something that lasted.

The fire they lit in 1776 has never gone out. This is where it began.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.