The Cause: The American Revolution and its Discontents, 1773-1783
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4.4 • 47 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
New York Times Book Review — Editors’ Choice • Chicago Tribune — "60 Best Reads for Right Now" • St. Louis Post-Dispatch — "50 Fall Books You Should Consider Reading"
Challenging conventional wisdom, The Cause offers a “necessary” (John S. Gardner, Guardian) account of the origins and clashing ideologies of America’s revolutionary era.
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
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The colonists didn't describe their war for independence as the American Revolution, Pulitzer winner Ellis (American Dialogue) points out in the preface to this richly detailed, multivoiced history. The term they used was "The Cause"—"a conveniently ambiguous label that provided a verbal canopy under which a diverse variety of political and regional persuasions could coexist." Ellis skillfully charts those divergent interests as they coalesced in the 1770s to oppose the British parliament's "new imperial policy" toward the colonies and details early military clashes in the North, struggles to secure funding for the Continental Army, and the decisive victory at Yorktown in October 1781. Peace negotiations in Paris "expanded to include the addition of a western domain with all the ingredients of a looming American empire" while the former colonists' resistance to "any form of consolidated power" became an enduring point of political tension. Ellis credits the deferral of democratic reforms by "prudent revolutionaries" such as John Adams and George Washington with helping the American Revolution to succeed where the French Revolution failed, but forcefully argues that ending slavery should have been the exception to the rule. Profiles of lesser-known figures including Continental Army soldier Joseph Plumb Martin and Mohawk chief Joseph Brant add depth and nuance to a familiar story. This expert account highlights the "improvisational" nature of America's founding.
Customer Reviews
Nuanced and informative
Able both to be precise and to humanize the signers of the Declaration of Independence. I appreciate now the international threads that contributed to the long march toward a Constitution and a nation. Thanks for opening my eyes to the role of financiers and diplomats—John Jay, Robert Morris vividly in mind now.