Overview

"From a Pulitzer Prize winner, a powerful history that reveals how the twin strands of liberty and slavery were joined in the nation's founding. ""Gut-wrenching. . . . While acknowledging that the study of liberty and slavery in the Revolutionary era remains a 'partisan minefield, ' Mr. Larson plunges in, sparing none of the era's most prominent revolutionaries from scrutiny."" --Harold Holzer, Wall Street Journal New attention from historians and journalists is raising pointed questions about the founding period: was the American revolution waged to preserve slavery, and was the Constitution a pact with slavery or a landmark in the antislavery movement? Leaders of the founding who called for American liberty are scrutinized for enslaving Black people themselves: George Washington consistently refused to recognize the freedom of those who escaped his Mount Vernon plantation. And we have long needed a history of the founding that fully includes Black Americans in the revolutionary protests, the war, and the debates over slavery and freedom that followed. We now have that history in Edward J. Larson's insightful synthesis of the founding. Indeed throughout Larson's brilliant history it is the voices of Black Americans that prove the most convincing of all on the urgency of liberty."

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"""An elegantly written, engaging, and immensely informative account of attempts by colonists to reconcile the implications of liberty with the reality of slavery for Blacks."" -- ""Pittsburgh Post-Gazette"" ""Larson makes clear how inseparable were the concepts of freedom and bondage in these early years, and thereby makes understandable why the contradictions they created have vexed us so long."" -- ""H. W. Brands, author of Our First Civil War"" ""Larson's stirring narrative....[is] an authoritative contribution to the dismal history of race in America."" -- "" Kirkus Reviews (starred review)"""

Author Information

Edward J. Larson is the author of many acclaimed works in American history, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the Scopes trial, Summer for the Gods. He is University Professor of History, and Hugh & Hazel Darling Chair in Law, at Pepperdine University. David de Vries can be seen in a number of feature films, including The Founder, The Accountant, Captain America: Civil War, and Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk. On television, his credits include House of Cards, Nashville, Halt and Catch Fire, the National Geographic film Killing Reagan, and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks for HBO. As a veteran stage actor, David appeared as Lumiere in Disney's Beauty and the Beast on Broadway, as Dr. Dillamond in the Los Angeles and Chicago companies of Wicked, and in hundreds of shows in regional theaters throughout the country. He is an Audie and Odyssey Award-winning narrator for his performance in Pam Munoz Ryan's Echo and has voiced over 100 titles in every genre, including his Audie Award-nominated performance of the 2011 Caldecott winner A Sick Day for Amos McGee.

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