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    Freedom Just Around the Corner: A New American History: 1585-1828
    Unavailable
    Freedom Just Around the Corner: A New American History: 1585-1828
    Unavailable
    Freedom Just Around the Corner: A New American History: 1585-1828
    Ebook1,094 pages19 hours

    Freedom Just Around the Corner: A New American History: 1585-1828

    By Walter A. McDougall

    4.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    A powerful reinterpretation of the founding of America by a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian.

    The creation of the United States of America is the central event of the past four hundred years," states Walter McDougall in his preface to Freedom Just Around the Corner. With this statement begins McDougall's most ambitious, original, and uncompromising of histories. McDougall marshals the latest scholarship and writes in a style redolent with passion, pathos, and humour in pursuit of truths often obscured in books burdened with political slants.

    With an insightful approach to the nearly 250 years spanning America's beginnings, McDougall offers his readers an understanding of the uniqueness of the "American character" and how this character has shaped the wide ranging course of historical events. McDougall explains that Americans have always been in a unique position of enjoying "more opportunity to pursue their ambitions䳨an any other people in history." Throughout Freedom Just Around the Corner the character of the American people shines, a character built out of a freedom to indulge in the whole panoply of human behaviour. The genius behind the success of the United States is founded on the complex, irrepressible American spirit.

    A grand narrative rich with new details and insights about colonial and early national history, Freedom Just Around the Corner is the first instalment of a trilogy that will eventually bring the story of America up to the present day, a story epic, bemusing, and brooding.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateApr 7, 2009
    ISBN9780061899843
    Unavailable
    Freedom Just Around the Corner: A New American History: 1585-1828
    Author

    Walter A. McDougall

    A professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, Walter A. McDougall is the author of many books, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Heavens and the Earth and Let the Sea Make a Noise. . . . He lives in Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage children.

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    Reviews for Freedom Just Around the Corner

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    • 5/5
      This book is a highly-readable and fresh look at well-known events and people, as well as the less-well known, including significant figures like Hugh Williamson of North Carolina, General Nathaniel Greene, and his enchanting wife Caty. McDougall is particularly scathing in his judgment of the military prowess of General Thomas Sullivan (who seems to be highly regarded in the western part of the state and in Pennsylvania). Names we may recognize but not place, such as the War of Jenkin's Ear, are quickly sketched and given a significance. In some cases where events are well known there is little narrative—the battles of the Revolutionary War or King Phillips War, but there is enough to get a good sense of the event and the larger context. Perhaps that is what McDougall does best—to place people and events in a context. New Jersey, as usual, gets short shrift, but this is not all about Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Virginia, either. He does work in a few events in most of the colonies, although usually in so few words as to gloss over any subtleties. The disputes in this colony over quit rents and land titles is not really mentioned, although it was at the core of colonial politics for a generation and certainly had implications for the Crown's dealings with the colony. It is not altogether an uplifting account, as his narrative is rife with bribery, cronyism, collusion, all kinds of sharp-dealings, as well as brutality and cheating, especially of Indians. But we knew that, of course; it just plays a more central role in McDougall's account. Too much emphasis is placed on the Masonic connections, in my opinion, and too little on the rich texture of local politics, which often had a disproportionate impact on national politics because of the way senators were chosen. He gives much emphasis to the role of religion (maybe too much), as well as its place in American society, apart from any role in economic and community development. In that respect, he does not seem to take cognizance of the low percentage of religious affiliation in the decades before 1820—one might be left with the impression that church membership was always high, even if members were not usually pious or observant. The author notes the astonishing fecundity of the settlers and the rapid growth in population of the western and border states between 1790 and 1830; it was not just the coastal cities that were growing through immigration but "natural" increase due to the large families and (apparently) decreasing infant mortality.McDougall is clearly an admirer of Hamilton and critical of Jefferson, who comes across as lazy, highly political, and unprincipled. To his credit, there is nothing of Jefferson's liaison with his slave which generally seems to be the center of much contemporary interpretation of the man. He places America's foreign activities, land purchases, wars and economic development in a context of European (mostly English and French, of course) activity, but there is too little on the impact of the West Indies, especially the Barbadian connections. He offers less emphasis on the "democratic" impulse in the western territories and states— those opposed to authority, patronage and pretensions, and more on party politics and the influence of specific personalities. Thus, it seems to me he leaves the impression that abolitionist sentiment arose out of nowhere in the form of an amendment to a bill admitting Missouri as a state. In this he skips over the role of the agitators, churches of the north, and the reforming classes. The book includes an unusually good account of the development of regional economies—mining, tobacco & cotton, canal-building, and the railroads, and of the machinations that often went into raising capital, borrowing, and obtaining charters, subsidies, and monopolies. The precarious financial condition of most states, as well as men of great estates, is a sub-theme. If the role of debt has not been examined by scholars of the early Republic, this work suggests it would be a good lode to mine. One particular revelation to me is that midwestern states—Indiana, Ohio, Illinois—were substantially settled by southerners; McDougall says of Indiana, "a northern state settled by southerners posing as westerners." Yet parts of these states were centers of the Free Soil/anti-slavery movement by the 1850s, a period not treated in this volume of what is intended to be a three volume work. Professor McDougall is off to an auspicious start. If you are interested in giving just one book on American history to a serious reader, today this is the book to give.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      it seemed interesting at least the part I read