Search results for ""Author Joseph J. Ellis""

A fresh look at this astute, likably quirky statesman, by the author of the Pulitzer Award-winning Founding Brothers and the National Book Award winning American Sphinx.

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George Washington claimed that anyone who attempted to provide an accurate account of the war for independence would be accused of writing fiction. At the time, no one called it the “American Revolution”: former colonists still regarded themselves as Virginians or Pennsylvanians, not Americans, while John Adams insisted that the British were the real revolutionaries, for attempting to impose radical change without their colonists’ consent. With The Cause, Ellis takes a fresh look at the events between 1773 and 1783, recovering a war more brutal than any in American history save the Civil War and discovering a strange breed of “prudent” revolutionaries, whose prudence proved wise yet tragic when it came to slavery, the original sin that still haunts America. Written with flair and drama, The Cause brings together a cast of familiar and forgotten characters who, taken together, challenge the story we have long told ourselves about our origins as a people and a nation.

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For Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Joseph J. Ellis, The Cause marks the culmination of a lifetime of engagement with the founding era, completing a trilogy of books that began with Founding Brothers. Here Ellis, countering popular histories that romanticize the “Spirit of ’76,” demonstrates through “evocative profiles of British loyalists, slaves, Native Americans and soldiers uncertain of what was being founded” (Christopher Borrelli, Chicago Tribune) that the rebels fought not for a nation but under the mantle of “The Cause,” a mutable, conveniently ambiguous principle all but destined to give rise to the warring factions of later American history. Combining action-packed tales of North American military campaigns with characteristically trenchant insight, The Cause “deftly foreshadows all the issues that would complicate America’s trajectory” (Richard Stengel, New York Times Book Review), forcing us to finally reconsider the story we have long told ourselves about our origins—as a people, and as a nation. “At the intersection of his expertise and our need for coherence about our national founding arrives historian Joseph J. Ellis. . . . Ellis is no apologist, but he is a chronicler of the entire revolution, its best aspirations, its worst contradictions, and its ongoing dilemmas.” —Hugh Hewitt, Washington Post

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