American Bloods
The Untamed Dynasty That Shaped a Nation
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
"American Bloods is an unflinching history of our nation . . . This is a breakout book for John Kaag—the natural extension of his genre-defining writing.” —Doris Kearns Goodwin, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Leadership: In Turbulent Times
"Kaag has a knack of stumbling upon treasures . . . The result is a thrilling and illuminating tale." —John Banville, The New Statesman
A history of a family spanning centuries and continents—one that unfolds into a new portrait of America.
The Bloods were one of America’s first and most expansive pioneer families. They explored and laid claim to the frontiers—geographic, political, intellectual, and spiritual—that would become the very core of the United States. John Kaag’s American Bloods is the account of a remarkable American family, of its participation in the making of a nation, and of how its members embodied the elusive ideals enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. Inspired by the discovery of a mysterious manuscript in an old Massachusetts farmhouse, Kaag follows eight members of this family from the British Civil Wars in the seventeenth century through the founding of the colonies, the American Revolution, transcendentalism, the Industrial Revolution, the Civil War, and the rise of first-wave feminism, all the way to the beginning of the twentieth century.
The Bloods were active participants in virtually every pivotal moment in American history, coming into contact with everyone from Emerson and Thoreau to John Brown, Frederick Douglass, Victoria Woodhull, and William James. The genealogy of the family tracks the ebb and flow of what Thoreau called “wildness,” an original untamed spirit that would recede in the making of America but would never be extinguished entirely. American Bloods is an enduring reminder of the risks and rewards that were taken in laying claim to the lands that would become the United States, and a composite portrait of America like no other.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Following the discovery of a "convoluted" genealogical document in a secret room in the author's newly purchased Massachusetts colonial farmhouse, this enthralling narrative from philosopher Kaag (Hiking with Nietzsche) unearths the story of one of America's oldest families, the Bloods. He examines how across three centuries the Bloods "explored, and laid claim to, the frontiers—geographic, political, intellectual and spiritual—that became the very core of a nation." Beginning with Englishman Thomas Blood and his thwarted 1671 attempt to steal the British crown jewels, Kaag's cast includes three brothers who settled in colonial New England; a Revolutionary War minuteman, Thaddeus, who inspired Ralph Waldo Emerson; Thaddeus's hermit son, Perez, who "fashioned an observatory" in the woods that captivated neighbor Henry David Thoreau; and Aretas, an early railroad industrialist. By the 1850s, many of the Bloods began to move West, including James Clinton Blood, an antislavery cofounder of Lawrence, Kans., who had encounters with abolitionist John Brown; Union Army officer James Harvey Blood, the common law husband of suffragette and spiritualist Victoria Woodhull; and mystic Benjamin Blood, who influenced philosopher William James. Kaag's sweeping portrayal of the Bloods as continuous participants in the country's intellectual and spiritual development reveals how central the idea of the frontier and its "wildness" was to the nation's elite. It's a unique ideological history of America.
