American Inheritance: Liberty and Slavery in the Birth of a Nation, 1765-1795

Larson, Edward J.

ISBN 10: 0393882209 / ISBN 13: 9780393882209

Published by W. W. Norton & Company, 2023

About this Item

Pages are clean with no markings. May show minor signs of wear or cosmetic defects marks, cuts, bends, or scuffs on the cover, spine, pages, or dust jacket. May have remainder marks on edges.

Seller Inventory # DBV.0393882209.VG

Bibliographic Details

• Title: American Inheritance: Liberty and Slavery in the Birth of a Nation, 1765-1795
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication Date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393882209
• ISBN 13: 9780393882209
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: very_good

About this title

Synopsis

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2023

From a Pulitzer Prize winner, a powerful history that reveals how the twin strands of liberty and slavery were joined in the nation’s founding.

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? Leaders of the founding who called for American liberty are scrutinized for enslaving Black people themselves: George Washington consistently refused to recognize the freedom of those who escaped his Mount Vernon plantation. And 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 Edward J. Larson’s insightful synthesis of the founding. With slavery thriving in Britain’s Caribbean empire and practiced in all of the American colonies, the independence movement’s calls for liberty proved narrow, though some Black observers and others made their full implications clear. In the war, both sides employed strategies to draw needed support from free and enslaved Blacks, whose responses varied by local conditions. By the time of the Constitutional Convention, a widening sectional divide shaped the fateful compromises over slavery that would prove disastrous in the coming decades. Larson’s narrative delivers poignant moments that deepen our understanding: we witness New York’s tumultuous welcome of Washington as liberator through the eyes of Daniel Payne, a Black man who had escaped enslavement at Mount Vernon two years before. Indeed, throughout Larson’s brilliant history it is the voices of Black Americans that prove the most convincing of all on the urgency of liberty.

8 pages of illustrations

About the Author

Edward J. Larson is the author of many acclaimed works of history, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning account of the Scopes trial, Summer for the Gods, and the recent study of liberty and slavery at the founding, American Inheritance. A chaired professor of history and law at Pepperdine University, Larson lives with his family near Los Angeles.