Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America

“A richly detailed, heavily documented, but 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

In the early 1770s, the men who invented America were living quiet, provincial lives in the rustic backwaters of the New World, devoted primarily to family, craft, and the private pursuit of wealth and happiness. None set out to become “revolutionary” by ambition, but when events in Boston escalated, they found themselves thrust into a crisis that moved quickly from protest to war. In Revolutionaries, Jack Rakove 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, ordinary men who became extraordinary, altered by history.

“Revolutionaries is a serious, probing work of history that boils down a careers worth of thinking and research.”—New York Times

“Superb . . . Rakove shows himself a master of historical writing on a grand scale.”—Chicago Tribune

Jack Rakove is the William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies and a professor of political science at Stanford University. He is the author of, among other books, Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1997.