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New attention from historians and journalists is raising pointed questions about the founding period: was the American revolution waged to preserve slavery, and was the Constitution a pact with slavery or a landmark in the antislavery movement? We have long needed a history of the founding that fully includes Black Americans in the Revolutionary protests, the war, and the debates over slavery and freedom that followed. We now have that history in Pulitzer Prize\\u2013winning historian Edward J. Larson\\u2019s insightful synthesis of the founding. Throughout Larson\\u2019s brilliant history, it is the voices of Black Americans that prove the most convincing of all on the urgency of liberty.

Shermer and Larson discuss: Was America founded in 1619 or 1776? \\u2022 What is/was an \\u201cAmerican\\u201d? \\u2022 Founding Fathers attitudes toward slavery \\u2022 What was the justification of slavery? \\u2022 constitutional convention and slavery compromises \\u2022 U.S. Constitution and slavery \\u2022 Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments \\u2022 Atlantic slave trade \\u2022 Fugitive Slave Act and Clause \\u2022 Native Americans \\u2022 monogenism vs. polygenism \\u2022 slavery abolition \\u2022 Quakers push for abolition \\u2022 Three-fifths Compromise \\u2022 The Dread Scott Decision and the Civil War \\u2022 Abraham Lincoln and his rational argument for ending slavery \\u2022 the future of race relations in America.

Edward J. Larson is the author of many acclaimed works in American history, including the Pulitzer Prize\\u2013winning history of the Scopes Trial, Summer for the Gods. He also authored Franklin and Washington: The Founding Partnership, The Return of George Washington 1783-1789, A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800\\u2014America\\u2019s First Presidential Campaign, An Empire of Ice: Scott, Shackleton, and the Heroic Age of Antarctic Science, To the Edges of the Earth: 1909, the Race for the Three Poles, and the Climax of the Age of Exploration, and the textbook Evolution: The Remarkable History of a Scientific Theory. He is University Professor of History and Hugh and Hazel Darling Chair in Law at Pepperdine University.