Volume 52, Number 12 · July 14, 2005
Founders & Keepers
By Gordon S. Wood
A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America
by Stacy Schiff
Henry Holt, 489 pp., $30.00
John Adams: Party of One
by James Grant
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 530 pp., $30.00
John Jay: Founding Father
by Walter Stahr
London: Hambledon and London,482 pp., $29.95
Every month, it seems, we have a new book on one or another of the founders who more than two hundred years ago created the United States. This is something peculiarly American. No other major nation celebrates its past historical characters in quite the way we Americans do, especially characters who existed two centuries ago. We want to know what Thomas Jefferson would think of affirmative action or what George Washington would think of the invasion of Iraq. The British don't have to check in periodically with, say, either of the two William Pitts the way we seem to have to check in with Jefferson or Washington. Americans seem to have a special need for these historical figures in the here and now. Although Americans understandably have had a continual interest in the Revolutionary period, the recent flood of popular histories and biographies of the founders seems unusual. What's going on?
Review, 4360 words
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