Flag Day

A Leap in the Dark:  The Struggle to Create the American Republic  - John Ferling

I will always read histories of The Movies and The American Revolution. Luckily, authors want to tap the lucrative and endless market for textbooks so there are plenty of choices. John Ferling’s A Leap in the Dark:  The Struggle to Create the American Republic focuses on patriots versus the British and then partriots versus other patriots.

To my surprise, I’ve found the early national period more interesting than the 1760s intolerable imperial encroachments (a close second) or battles (a distant third). Ferling’s specialty at the State University of West Georgia is the political conflicts of the 1790s.

He devotes about half the book on the conflicts among Hamilton, Jefferson, and Adams. Like Bernard Bailyn, Ferling makes a strong argument for Jefferson’s political savvy and organizational skills. Ferling also elucidates how region and class made elites different in their socio-economic interests. In one mini-biography Ferling tells the story of a nouveau riche from New York, Abraham Yates. He rose from a "humble farm family" to the New York state legislature, thus representing to figures such as Hamilton the rise of upstarts that would foment a social revolution.

I think that lay readers with a serious interest in the early republic who enjoy Joseph Ellis' books (here and here and here and here)would enjoy this one. So would undergraduate history majors and graduate students.