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AMERICAN INHERITANCE

Edward J. Larson

Liberty and Slavery in the Birth of a Nation, 1765-1795

The Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, Edward J. Larson, reveals how the twin strands of American inheritance became intertwined during the Revolutionary crisis.
The United States was born of liberty and slavery. Sparked by denunciations of British designs to enslave Americans, the Revolutionary movement was led by men who themselves owned enslaved Blacks. The widely noted contradictions played out from the early protests of 1765, through independence and the Revolutionary War, and on into the Constitutional Convention and the first administration of a slave-owning president. Edward J. Larson's beautifully written, deeply researched narrative captures the historical significance and personal poignance of these major events. He engages questions that have entered public debate, such as whether the American Revolution was fought to preserve slavery, and was the Constitution adopted by northern and southern states already dividing over slavery fatally compromised? Washington emerges as a military liberator who was especially insistent on the capture of his fugitives, whose voices join those of other Black Americans as the most convincing of all on the urgency of liberty. Edward J. Larson is the author of many acclaimed works in American history, including the Pulitzer Prizewinning history of the Scopes Trial, Summer for the Gods. He is University Professor of History and Hugh and Hazel Darling Chair in Law at Pepperdine University, and lives with his family near Los Angeles.
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Published 2023-01-17 by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. - New York (USA)

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Timely and compelling. American Inheritance relates the vital story of liberty and slavery in Revolutionary America with balance and nuance.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion, Larson probes the awful contradiction at the heart of the American Revolution: it was fought to liberate the Colonies from England by settlers who themselves enslaved others.

Mr. Larson is a calm but vigorous storyteller who melds sophisticated historical analysis with telling anecdotes to vivify a graceful narrative, distilling 30 years of history - and sophistry - into a swift, compelling form.... does not shrink from exposing the gaping blind spot that even some of their contemporaries recognized.."Liberty and slavery remain our conflicted American inheritance," Mr. Larson persuasively concludes. He has invited us to the belated, unflinching and painful reading of the will. How we deal with the legacy is up to us. Read more...

[A]n accessible and informative overview of the paradox at the heart of the American experiment.

Larson makes clear how inseparable were the concepts of freedom and bondage in these early years, and thereby makes understandable why the contradictions they created have vexed us so long.

[A] compelling account of the tangled relationship between liberty and slavery... Larson is a judicious and often eloquent guide through the thicket, making a persuasive case that both liberty and slavery, real and imagined, cannot be untangled from the thinking of the founders, the institutions they created, and the ways in which Americans understood their society. Read more...

An authoritative contribution to the dismal history of race in America.

Larson has brought a true historian's sensibility to the fierce new debate over slavery at the founding. American Inheritance unearths a legacy of unexpected ironies, terrible tragedies, and fateful opportunities - a legacy with which Americans still struggle today.

...Venturing into divisions that extend from the 1600s into current discourse, he crafts an enlightening account of how, despite their irreconcilable meanings, liberty and slavery were conjoined in the birth of the nation from 1765 to 1795. Even after the Civil War, he concludes, "The long shadow of slavery continued to undermine declarations of liberty and equality... Liberty and slavery remain our conflicted American inheritance" today. Read more...

A seminal and soulful account of the antagonistic role slavery played in the founding of the United States. Every chapter is anchored in deep research, fine-tuned analysis, and good old-fashioned storytelling.

An elegantly written, engaging and immensely informative account. Read more...

A master storyteller and meticulous analyst, Larson offers a wise and balanced account of the founding era's thorniest themes: liberty, equality, slavery, and race. Larson's trademark blend of deep erudition and easygoing prose animates every page of this instant classic.

Edward J. Larson's "American Inheritance" is a welcome addition to a public conversation, in the wake of The New York Times's 1619 Project, that has largely produced more heat than light... Larson's sober new book...repays reading, for it has a good deal to teach those who want to see the American story in overly simplistic terms. Read more...

Larson deftly explores the dramatic lives and revealing words of free and enslaved Americans who sought either to preserve or erase the pervasive tension between liberty and bondage in the Revolutionary era.