Download Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America AudioBook Free
In the first 1770s, the men who created America were living noiseless, provincial lives in the rustic backwaters of the brand new World, devoted primarily to family, art, and the private pursuit of wealth and happiness. None set out to become "groundbreaking" by ambition, but when situations in Boston escalated, they found themselves thrust into a crisis that moved, in a matter of months, from protest to battle.In this remarkable booklet, historian Jack Rakove shows the way the private lives of the men were instantly transformed into open public occupations - how Washington became a strategist, Franklin a pioneering ethnical diplomat, Madison a sophisticated constitutional thinker, and Hamilton a brilliant policymaker. Rakove shakes off accepted notions of the men as godlike visionaries, focusing instead on the development with their ideas and the crystallizing with their goal. In Revolutionaries, we start to see the founders before these were fully formed market leaders, as individuals whose lives were radically improved by the explosive situations of the mid-1770s. These were common men who became amazing - a change that finally gets the literary treatment it deserves.Spanning both crucial ages of the country's beginning, from 1773 to 1792, Revolutionaries uses little-known reviews of the famous (and not so famous) men to capture-in a means no single biography ever could - the intensely creative period of the republic's founding. From Boston Tea Party to the First Continental Congress, from Trenton to Valley Forge, from the ratification of the Constitution to the disputes that resulted in our two-party system, Rakove explores the fighting views of politics, battle, diplomacy, and culture that molded our region.Thoughtful, clear-minded, and persuasive, Revolutionaries is a majestic mixture of narrative and intellectual record, one of those rare books that makes us think afresh about how exactly the country had become, and why the idea of America endures.
