George Washington's Journey; The President Forges a New Nation

xiii, [1], 304, [2] pages. Appendix: Hiding in Plain Sight. Notes. Index. Author signature on the title page. Timothy H. Breen (born September 5, 1942 in Ohio) is an American Professor, writer, and an expert on the colonial history of the United States. Timothy H. Breen (born September 5, 1942 in Ohio) is an American Professor, writer, and an expert on the colonial history of the United States. He is currently the William Smith Mason Professor of American History Emeritus at Northwestern University, Illinois, and a James Marsh Professor at Large at the University of Vermont. He is the founding director of the Kaplan Humanities Center and the Nicholas D. Chabraja Center for Historical Studies at Northwestern. Breen is a specialist on the American Revolution. Breen won the Colonial War Society Prize for the best book on the American Revolution for Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (2004), the T. Saloutus Prize for agricultural history for his book Tobacco Culture: The Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters of the Eve of Revolution, and the Historical Preservation Book Prize for his work Imagining the Past: East Hampton Histories, and several prizes for "George Washington's Journey: The President Forges a New Nation." Breen received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D in history from Yale University. He has written for the New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, The American Scholar, the New York Times, and the London Review of Books. This is George Washington in the surprising role of political strategist. T.H. Breen introduces us to a George Washington we rarely meet. During his first term as president, he decided that the only way to fulfill the Revolution was to take the new federal government directly to the people. He organized an extraordinary journey carrying him to all thirteen states. It transformed American political culture. For Washington, the stakes were high. If the nation fragmented, as it had almost done after the war, it could never become the strong, independent nation for which he had fought. In scores of communities, he communicated a powerful and enduring message, that America was now a nation, not a loose collection of states. And the people responded to his invitation in ways that he could never have predicted. Derived from a Publishers Weekly article: With the vitality of a great storyteller, Breen recreates the journeys that Washington made between 1789 and 1791 through the original 13 states as the new president introduced himself to his constituents. It's an absorbing portrait of early America's struggles, and Breen points out that neither Washington nor the people he met knew quite what it meant to be a citizen of this new republic. Breen brilliantly attends to the political differences that threatened Washington's newly formed cabinet, as well as to the ways that American citizens had already written Washington into their own political narrative: a Revolutionary War hero hailed as an American Caesar. Yet, Washington sought to deliver a message that this new republic could work only with a "strong and honest federal government and a citizenry committed to the preservation of human rights and liberty." Issues such as slavery would divide the new nation soon enough, but Washington returned home optimistic about the state of the union. Breen's superb chronicle offers glimpses into Washington's love of his country and its people, and his willingness to meet them on their own terms to secure the unity of the new republic. First Simon & Schuster Hardcover Edition [stated], First Printing [stated].…