Download In the Name of the Father: Washington's Legacy, Slavery, and the Making of a Nation AudioBook Free
How did people inside our country-North and South, East and West-come to share an amazingly durable and regular common vision of what it meant to be an American in the first fifty years following the Revolution? How did the country respond to the condition of slavery in a republic? In the Name of the Father immerses us in the rich, riotous world of what François Furstenberg calls civic texts, the patriotic words and images circulating through every corner of the united states in newspapers and almanacs, books and primers, paintings and even the most homely of domestic ornaments. We see how the leaders of the founding generation became "the founding fathers," how their words, especially George Washington's, became America's sacred scripture. And we see how the civic education they promoted is impossible to comprehend beyond your context of America's increasing religiosity.
In the Name of the Father is filled up with vivid stories of American print culture, including an excellent consideration of the first great American hack biographer cum bookseller, Parson Weems, writer of the first blockbuster Washington biography. But François Furstenberg's achievement is not limited by showing what each one of these civic texts were and how they infused Americans with a national spirit: the way they created what Abraham Lincoln so famously called "the mystic chords of memory." He goes further showing how the procedure for defining the nice citizen in America was complicated and compromised by the condition of slavery. Ultimately, we see how reconciling slavery and republican nationalism would have fateful consequences that haunt us still, in attitudes toward the socially powerless that persist in America to this day
