Book description
A major new history from our most trusted voice on the Revolutionary era, the author of the Pulitzer Prizeâwinning Founding Brothers and the National Book Award winner American Sphinx, and featured in THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION, a film by Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein, and David Schmidt, on PBS.
An astounding lookâŚ
Why read it?
1 author picked The Great Contradiction as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
In this 250th year of the founding of the United States as a democratic republic, I wanted to be immersed in the history of the era. In this book, Pulitzer-Prize-winning author Joseph Ellis uses primary sources (letters written by the founders) to bring that era to life. This book examines the great contradiction between slavery and the values of our revolution. Why didn't the founders abolish slavery when they wrote our nation's constitution? Why indeed did they make a conscious decision not to deal with this issue when so many of the delegates to the constitutional convention recognized that slave-makingâŚ
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