The Great Republic: A History of America - Hardcover

Churchill, Winston S.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 037550320X ISBN 13: 9780375503207

Publisher: Random House, 1999

Synopsis

The Great Republic is Sir Winston Churchill's personal vision of American history, from the arrival of the first European settlers to the dawn of the Cold War, edited by his grandson, the historian and journalist Winston S. Churchill. The book is a magnificent retelling of the American story, including some of the best short histories of the   Revolutionary War and the Civil War ever written. The bulk of this book, America's history up to the twentieth century, has until now been found only within Churchill's much longer four-volume A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1953. The chapters on America from that larger work have been knit together into a whole, and to them Winston S. Churchill has added essays and speeches of his grandfather's, many never before published in book form, to bring the book up to the mid-twentieth   century.
        
Sir Winston Churchill's renown as a statesman has tended to overshadow his great gifts as a historian. History was the work of his heart's delight, and few subjects were dearer to him than America. His mother, Jennie Jerome, was American, and all of his life Churchill harbored a deep warmth of feeling for this country and a sense of its special destiny. With fondness, he called America "the Great Republic," and in his later years he trained all of his powers on the history this book contains. The Great Republic is stirring in its sweep and breathtaking in the flash and vigor of its insights. Only an author with Sir Winston Churchill's special perspective on America, his experience as a leader and strategist, his intimacy with the responsibilities of guiding a nation, and his great gifts as a narrative historian could have written a book that lays out America's history, character, and destiny with this book's special brilliance.

Statesman and historian Sir Winston Churchill led Great Britain through the Second World War as prime minister. He was the author of forty-two books, including the six-volume history The Second World War, which was chosen by the National Review as the nonfiction "book of the century."

About this title

Review:

Drawn from uncollected speeches and articles as well as from the author's four-volume History of the English-Speaking Peoples, this anthology of the great statesman Winston Churchill's writings on American history highlights both its author's vigorous prose style and his commitment to the idea that the United States and the United Kingdom shared not only a common past but a common destiny.

As a young man, writes his namesake and grandson in his introduction, Churchill toured some of the battlefields of the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, and it is in writing of these two epochs and the expansionist years between them that Churchill is strongest. Of particular interest are his remarks on the ideological origins of the colonial revolution in such documents as the Magna Carta and the teachings of the Puritan elders, although, as an eminently practical politician, Churchill gives attention to less lofty causes of dissent--for instance, the English crown's logistical difficulty in governing an overseas empire with ideas of governance and resources of its own. Churchill's reflections on the Second World War are also of much value, and he provides an insider's view of the defeat of Nazism and the birth of the cold war.

Devotees of Churchill's work will not find much new here, but readers approaching him for the first time will find this volume to be a fine introduction to Churchill's writing and thought. --Gregory McNamee

From the Back Cover:

"In this absorbing volume, skillfully culled by his grandson from

Winston Churchill's vast literary output, the greatest Englishman of the twentieth century paints with surpassing elegance his

portrait of American history and the American character. This is

a good book to read--and a book to savor."
--Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

"This excellent volume gives the gist of all Winston Churchill's writings and observations about American history. It is a wonderful read for Americans, and tells them a great deal about their country which many of them do not know and ought to know."
--Paul Johnson, author of A History of the American People

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 037550320X
• ISBN 13: 9780375503207
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 480