Joseph J. Ellis, "The Cause: The American Revolution and Its Discontents, 1773-1783" (Liveright, 2021)
In one of the most \u201cexciting and engaging\u201d (Gordon S. Wood) histories of the American founding in decades, Pulitzer Prize\u2013winning historian Joseph J. Ellis offers an epic account of the origins and clashing ideologies of America\u2019s revolutionary era, recovering a war more brutal, and more disorienting, than any in our history, save perhaps the Civil War.\nFor more than two centuries, historians have debated the history of the American Revolution, disputing its roots, its provenance, and above all, its meaning. These questions have intrigued Ellis\u2015one of our most celebrated scholars of American history\u2015throughout his entire career. With this much-anticipated volume, he at last brings the story of the revolution to vivid life, with \u201csurprising relevance\u201d (Susan Dunn) for our modern era. Completing a trilogy of books that began with\xa0Founding Brothers,\xa0The Cause: The American Revolution and Its Discontents, 1773-1783\xa0(Liveright, 2021) returns us to the very heart of the American founding, telling the military and political story of the war for independence from the ground up, and from all sides: British and American, loyalist and patriot, white and Black.\nTaking us from the end of the Seven Years\u2019 War to 1783, and drawing on a wealth of previously untapped sources,\xa0The Cause\xa0interweaves action-packed tales of North American military campaigns with parlor-room intrigues back in England, creating a thrilling narrative that brings together a cast of familiar and long-forgotten characters. Here Ellis recovers the stories of Catherine Littlefield Greene, wife of Major General Nathanael Greene, the sister among the \u201cband of brothers\u201d; Thayendanegea, a Mohawk chief known to the colonists as Joseph Brant, who led the Iroquois Confederation against the Patriots; and Harry Washington, the enslaved namesake of George Washington, who escaped Mount Vernon to join the British Army and fight against his former master.\nCountering popular histories that romanticize the \u201cSpirit of \u201976,\u201d Ellis demonstrates that the rebels fought under the mantle of \u201cThe Cause,\u201d a mutable, conveniently ambiguous principle that afforded an umbrella under which different, and often conflicting, convictions and goals could coexist. Neither an American nation nor a viable government existed at the end of the war. In fact, one revolutionary legacy regarded the creation of such a nation, or any robust expression of government power, as the ultimate betrayal of The Cause. This legacy alone rendered any effective response to the twin tragedies of the founding\u2015slavery and the Native American dilemma\u2015problematic at best.\n Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House\u2019s\xa0International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's\xa0Reviews in History\xa0and the University of Rouen's online periodical\xa0Cercles.\nLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices\nSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law