Description
Book SynopsisFocusing his study on prominent Americans who came of age before and during the Revolution - notably John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington - Craig Bruce Smith shows how a colonial ethical transformation caused and became inseparable from the American Revolution, creating an ethical ideology that still remains.
Trade Review“Fresh perspectives and an author's willingness to take on orthodoxy are the hallmarks of books worth reading. Craig Bruce Smith provides these attributes in his new volume that conveys the story of the American Revolution through an ethical lens. Focusing not on the battles, he offers a new causation theory for the armed rebellion and why changes in ethical thinking created a common cause for the rebels, which was instrumental in the success of the Revolution.”- Eugene Procknow
“Smith has succeeded in writing an important book that revolutionary historians and anyone interested in the place of ethics in public life should read.”- Mark Boonshoft,
The Junto“Readers will appreciate Smith's insights into the formation of American national ideals. He scaled a mountain of archival research. . . . [and] writes with fluidity and power, forging his disparate materials into a cohesive shape while retaining a great deal of rich detail.”-
American Historical Review“An engaging and scholarly exploration of the way honor and virtue motivated the colonists who created the American republic.”-
The New Criterion“A highly original work that deals gracefully with difficult and often amorphous terms and that succeeds in reinvigorating debates on honor culture, inching us closer to a more holistic understanding of the American Revolution.”-
Journal of Southern History
