Volume 23, Number 18 · November 11, 1976
The Founders' Virtues
By Garry Wills
The Challenge of the American Revolution
by Edmund S. Morgan
Norton, 224 pp., $10.95
The Meaning of Independence: Adams, Washington and Jefferson
by Edmund S. Morgan
University of Virginia Press, 81 pp., $7.50
Adams and Jefferson: A Revolutionary Dialogue
by Merrill D. Peterson
University of Georgia Press, 164 pp., $7.00 (to be published in December)
The Character of John Adams
by Peter Shaw
University of North Carolina Press, 324 pp., $12.95
The Life of George Washington
by Washington Irving, edited by Jess Stein
Sleepy Hollow Restorations, 800 pp., $19.95
George Washington: A Biography
by Washington Irving, edited by Charles Neider
Doubleday, 740 pp., $9.95
Jefferson: A Revealing Biography
by Page Smith
McGraw-Hill, 320 pp., $12.50
Some scholars put impenetrable stuff in the journals, and polish it toward intelligibility for their books. But Edmund Morgan's articles are even better written than his books. This may be because they were first delivered as papers, where attention must be won, paragraph by paragraph. Certainly the Williamsburg audience that heard Morgan, in 1971, answer those who lump him with 'consensus historians' found it worth their while to stay awake for a conclusion that wittily recast William Wirt's recasting of the speech of Patrick Henry:
Review, 4014 words
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