The Old Revolutionaries

The Old Revolutionaries

The "old revolutionaries" were Samuel Adams, Isaac Sears, Thomas Young, Richard Henry Lee and Charels Carroll, five men who played significant roles in the American Revolution, and who are usually overlooked in history books today. Of widely varying backgrounds and interests, all of them had thir gratest influence in the years between 1769 and 1776 and all of them saw their power transferred after the war to the men we know as "the founding fathers." In telling the stories of these men, Pauline Maier shows how the American Revolution was less a collective movement than a committment to an ideal of a republic, which different people interpreted differently, and she describes "not just why Americans made the Revolution, but what the Revolution did to them."

The Old Regime and the Revolution

Revolutionaries

“[A] wide-ranging and nuanced group portrait of the Founding Fathers” by a Pulitzer Prize winner (The New Yorker). In the early 1770s, the men who invented America were living quiet, provincial lives in the rustic backwaters of the New World, devoted to family and the private pursuit of wealth and happiness. None set out to become “revolutionary.” But when events in Boston escalated, they found themselves thrust into a crisis that moved quickly from protest to war. In Revolutionaries, a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian shows how the private lives of these men were suddenly transformed into public careers—how Washington became a strategist, Franklin a pioneering cultural diplomat, Madison a sophisticated constitutional thinker, and Hamilton a brilliant policymaker. 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. We see the founders before they were fully formed leaders, as ordinary men who became extraordinary, altered by history. “[An] eminently readable account of the men who led the Revolution, wrote the Constitution and persuaded the citizens of the thirteen original states to adopt it.” —San Francisco Chronicle “Superb . . . a distinctive, fresh retelling of this epochal tale . . . Men like John Dickinson, George Mason, and Henry and John Laurens, rarely leading characters in similar works, put in strong appearances here. But the focus is on the big five: Washington, Franklin, John Adams, Jefferson, and Hamilton. Everyone interested in the founding of the U.S. will want to read this book.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review