Alan Taylor (1)Rezensionen

Important historical work that adds to the perspective of American history, especially the War of 1812, in which enslaved people fought for the British to earn their freedom.

Important historical work that adds to the perspective of American history, especially the War of 1812, in which enslaved people fought for the British to earn their freedom.

Intriguing subject matter on a comparatively obscure angle of history, quite revelatory, but the history itself is somewhat repetitive in the telling. It's not a failure of the book, it's a quality of the story being told. But it is a very enlightening examination of the surprising facts behind a war most Americans think they know a little about, but know less than they realize.

I didn’t enjoy this nearly as much as the author's previous American Revolutions

It seemed too tedious (long, detailed descriptions of the lives of various people in Jefferson’s orbit). It’s intended audience seems to be buffs about the history of the University of Virginia.

I found this book to be both surprising and absorbing. For some odd reason, I'd never directly connected James Fenimore Cooper with Cooperstown, NY (having only read "The Deerslayer"). The author here mixes a biography of Judge William Cooper and his family (including his son, the future author) with social and financial history in a way that is quite engrossing. I would definitely recommend this book, and I see why it won the prize it did.½

Review of: American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783-1850,
by Alan Taylor
by Stan Prager (12-11-21)

Conspicuous in their absence from my 1960s elementary education were African Americans and Native Americans. Enslaved blacks made an appearance in my textbooks, of course, but slavery as an institution was sketched out as little more than a vague and largely benign product of the times. Then there was a Civil War fought over white men’s sectional grievances; there were dates, and battles, and generals, winners and losers. There was Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, then constitutional amendments that ended slavery and guaranteed equality. There was some bitterness but soon there was reconciliation, and we went on to finish building the transcontinental railroad. There were the obligatory walk-on cameos by Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, and later George Washington Carver, who had something to do with peanuts. For Native Americans, the record was even worse. Our texts featured vignettes of Squanto, Pocahontas, Sacajawea, and Sitting Bull. The millions of Amerindians that once populated the country from coast to coast had been effectively erased.
Alan Taylor, Pulitzer Prize winning author and arguably the foremost living historian of early America, has devoted a lifetime to redressing those twin wrongs while restoring the nuanced complexity of our past that was utterly excised from the standard celebration of our national heritage that for so long dominated our historiography. In the process, in the eleven books he has published to date, he has also dramatically shifted the perspective and widened the lens from the familiar approach that more rigidly defines the boundaries of the geography and the established chapters in the history of the United States—a stunning collective achievement that reveals key peoples, critical elements, and greater themes often obscured by the traditional methodology.
I first encountered Taylor some years ago when I read his magnificent American Colonies: The Settling of North America, which restores the long overlooked multicultural and multinational participants who peopled the landscape, while at the same time enlarging the geographic scope beyond the English colonies that later comprised the United States to encompass the rest of the continent that was destined to become Canada and Mexico, as well as highlighting vital links to the West Indies. Later, in American Revolutions, Taylor identifies a series of social, economic and political revolutions of outsize significance over more than five decades that often go unnoticed in the shadows of the War of Independence, which receives all the attention.
Still, as Taylor underscores, it was the outcome of the latter struggle—in which white, former English colonists established a new nation—that was to have the most lasting and dire consequences for all those in their orbit who were not white, former English colonists, most especially blacks and Native Americans. The defeated British had previously drawn boundaries that served as a brake on westward expansion and left more of that vast territory as a home to the indigenous. That brake was now off. Some decades later, Britain was to abolish slavery throughout its empire, which no longer included its former colonies. Thus the legacy of the American Revolution was the tragic irony that a Republic established to champion liberty and equality for white men would ultimately be constructed upon the backs of blacks doomed to chattel slavery, as well as the banishment or extermination of Native Americans. This theme dominates much of Taylor’s work.
In his latest book, American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783-1850, which roughly spans the period from the Peace of Paris to California statehood, Taylor further explores this grim theme in a brilliant analysis of how the principles of white supremacy—present at the creation—impacted the subsequent course of United States history. Now this is, of course, uncomfortable stuff for many Americans, who might cringe at that very notion amid cries of revisionism that insist contemporary models and morality are being appropriated and unfairly leveraged against the past. But terminology is less important than outcomes: non-whites were not only foreclosed from participating as citizens in the new Republic, but also from enjoying the life, liberty and pursuit of happiness allegedly granted to their white counterparts. At the same time, southern states where slavery thrived wielded outsize political power that frequently plotted the nation’s destiny. As in his other works, Taylor is a master of identifying unintended consequences, and there are more than a few to go around in the insightful, deeply analytical, and well-written narrative that follows.
These days, it is almost de rigueur for historians to decry the failure of the Founders to resolve the contradictions of permitting human chattel slavery to coexist within what was declared to be a Republic based upon freedom and equality. In almost the same breath, however, many in the field still champion the spirit of compromise that has marked the nation’s history. But if there is an original sin to underscore, it is less that slavery was allowed to endure than that it was codified within the very text of the Constitution of the United States by means of the infamous compromise that was the “three-fifths rule,” which for the purposes of representation permitted each state to count enslaved African Americans as three-fifths of a person, thus inflating the political power of each state based upon their enslaved population. This might have benefited all states equally, but since slavery was to rapidly decline and all but disappear above what would be drawn as the Mason-Dixon, all the advantage flowed to the south, where eventually some states saw its enslaved population outnumber its free white citizenry.
This was to prove dramatic, since the slave south claimed a disproportionate share of national political power when it came to advancing legislation or, for that matter, electing a president! Taylor notes that the disputed election of 1824 that went for decision to the House of Representatives would have been far less disputed without the three-fifths clause, since in that case John Quincy Adams would have led Andrew Jackson in the Electoral College 83 to 77 votes, instead of putting Jackson in the lead 99 to 84. [p253] When Jackson prevailed in the next election, it was the south that cemented his victory.
The scholarly consensus has established the centrality of slavery to the Civil War, but Taylor goes further, arguing that its significance extended long before secession: slavery was ever the central issue in American history, representing wealth, power, and political advantage. The revolutionary generation decried slavery on paper—slave masters Washington, Jefferson and Madison all pronounced it one form of abomination or another—but nevertheless failed to act against it, or even part with their own human property. Jefferson famously declared himself helpless, saying of the peculiar institution that “We have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go,” but as slavery grew less profitable for Virginia in the upper south, Jefferson and his counterparts turned to breeding the enslaved for sale to the lower south, where the demand was great. Taylor points out that “In 1803 a male field hand sold for about $600 in South Carolina compared to $400 in Virginia: a $200 difference enticing to Virginia sellers and Carolina slave traders … Between 1790 and 1860, in one of the largest forced migrations in world history, slave traders and migrants herded over a million slaves from Virginia and Maryland to expand southern society ...” [p159] Data and statistics may obscure it, but these were after all living, breathing, sentient human beings who were frequently subjected to great brutalities while enriching those who held them as chattel property.
Jefferson and others of his ilk imagined that slavery would somehow fall out of favor at some distant date, but optimistically kicking the can down the road to future generations proved a fraught strategy: nothing but civil war could ever have ended it. As Taylor notes:
Contrary to the wishful thinking of many Patriots, slavery did not wither away after the American Revolution. Instead, it became more profitable and entrenched as the South expanded westward. From 698,600 in 1790, the number of enslaved people soared to nearly 4 million by 1860, when they comprised a third of the South’s population … In 1860, the monetary value of enslaved people exceeded that of all the nation’s banks, factories, and railroads combined. Masters would never part with so much valuable human property without a fight. [p196]
As bad as it was for enslaved blacks, in the end Native Americans fared far worse. It has been estimated that up to 90% of Amerindians died as a result to exposure to foreign pathogens within a century of the Columbian Experience. The survivors faced a grim future competing for land and resources with rapacious settlers who were better armed and better organized. It may very well be that conflict between colonists and the indigenous was inevitable, but as Taylor emphasizes, the trajectory of the relationship became especially disastrous for the latter after British retreat essentially removed all constraints on territorial expansion.
The stated goal of the American government was peaceful coexistence that emphasized native assimilation to “white civilization.” The Cherokees who once inhabited present-day Georgia actually attempted that, transitioning from hunting and gathering to agriculture, living in wooden houses, learning English, creating a written language. Many practiced Christianity. Some of the wealthiest worked plantations with enslaved human property. It was all for naught. With the discovery of gold in the vicinity, the Cherokees were stripped of their lands in the Indian Removal Act of 1830, championed by President Andrew Jackson, and marched at bayonet point over several months some 1200 miles to the far west. Thousands died in what has been dubbed the “Trail of Tears,” certainly one of the most shameful episodes of United States history. Sadly, rather than an exception, the fate of the Cherokees proved to be indicative of what lay in store for the rest of the indigenous as the new nation grew and the hunger for land exploded.
That hunger, of course, also fueled the Mexican War, launched on a pretext in yet another shameful episode that resulted in an enormous land grab that saw a weaker neighbor forced to cede one-third of its former domains. It was the determination of southern states to transplant plantation-based slavery to these new territories—and the fierce resistance to that by “Free-Soilers” in Lincoln’s Republican Party—that lit the fuse of secession and the bloody Civil War that it spawned.
If there are faults to this fine book, one is that there is simply too much material to capably cover in less than four hundred pages, despite the talented pen and brilliant analytical skills of Alan Taylor. The author devoted an entire volume—The Civil War of 1812—to the events surrounding the War of 1812, a conflict also central to a subsequent effort, The Internal Enemy. This kind of emphasis on a particular event or specific theme is typical of Taylor’s work. In American Republics, he strays from that technique to attempt the kind of grand narrative survey seen by other chroniclers of the Republic, powering through decades of significance at sometimes dizzying speeds, no doubt a delight for some readers but yet disappointing to others long accustomed to the author’s detailed focus on the more narrowly defined.
Characteristic of his remarkable perspicacity, Taylor identifies what other historians overlook, arguing in American Republics that the War of 1812 was only the most well-known struggle in a consequential if neglected era he calls the “Wars of the 1810s” that also saw the British retreat northward, the Spanish forsake Florida, and the dispossession of Native Americans accelerate. [p148] That could be a volume in itself. Likewise, American culture and politics in the twelve years that separate Madison and Jackson is worthy of book-length treatment. There is so much more.
Another issue is balance—or a lack thereof. If the history of my childhood was written solely in the triumphs of white men, such accomplishments are wholly absent in American Republics, which reveals the long-suppressed saga of the once invisible victims of white supremacy. It’s a true story, an important story—but it’s not the only story. Surely there are some achievements of the Republic worthy of recognition here?
As the culture wars heat to volcanic temperatures, such omissions only add tinder to the flames of those dedicated to the whitewash that promotes heritage over history. Already the right has conjured an imaginary bugaboo in Critical Race Theory (CRT), with legislation in place or pending in a string of states that proscribes the teaching of CRT. These laws have nothing to do with Critical Race Theory, of course, but rather give cover to the dog whistles of those who would intimidate educators so they cannot teach the truth about slavery, about Reconstruction, about Civil Rights. These laws put grade-school teachers at a risk of termination for incorporating factual elements of our past into their curriculum, effectively banning from the classroom the content of much of American Republics. This is very serious stuff: Alan Taylor is a distinguished professor at the University of Virginia, a state that saw the governor-elect recently ride to an unlikely victory astride a sort of anti-CRT Trojan Horse. Historians cannot afford any unforced errors in a game that scholars seem to be ceding to dogmatists. If the current trend continues, we may very well witness reprints of my childhood textbooks, with blacks and the indigenous once more consigned to the periphery.
I have read seven of Taylor’s books to date. Like the others, his most recent work represents a critical achievement for historical scholarship, as well as a powerful antidote to the propaganda that formerly tarnished studies of the American Experience. The United States was and remains a nation unique in the family of nations, replete with a fascinating history that is at once complicated, messy, and controversial. American history, at its most basic, is simply a story of how we got from then to now: it can only be properly understood and appreciated in the context of its entirety, warts and all. Anything less is a disservice to the discipline as well as to the audience. To that end, American Republics is required reading.

Review of: American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783-1850, by Alan Taylor https://regarp.com/2021/12/11/review-of-american-republics-a-continental-history...  
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Note: I have reviewed other works by Alan Taylor here:
Review of: American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804, by Alan Taylor
Review of: The Internal Enemy: Slavery and the War in Virginia 1772-1832, by Alan Taylor
Review of: The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies by Alan Taylor
Review of: Thomas Jefferson’s Education, by Alan Taylor
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Taylor is a fill-in-the-gaps historian, adding correctives to standard narratives by including African-American and Indians as central players. Geographically he includes areas often overlooked beyond the 13 colonies. And he shows how big picture the motivations of Empires, including the new American, were driving forces. All of this is important and it's hard to disagree. He is playing what we call in Wikipedia "WEIGHT" ie. how much attention to give certain subjects. A re-balancing of the past - less Valley Forge, more Western. Less Bunker Hill, more slavery. etc. The problem is unless you already have a preexisting foundation of the war it feels like what it is, revisionism. Taylor is best approached after you have a good understanding of the period, then you can see it from a new weighted perspective. As a core history of the war I don't think it achieves.½

An history of period from the revolution to the Civil War. It takes a modern approach to historical method, asks hard questions about earlier histories, and tells stories about the people who lived in those times.

This is the 20th anniversary of the book, it has held up well. Taylor shows that the 300 years of the 16th to 18th centuries were much more than the 13 colonies. Indians and African slaves were not mere footnotes but central players. Besides the British there are French, Spanish and Russian, not to mention a polyglot of other nations who settled in North America. The geographic range is vast from Alaska to the sugar islands in the Caribbean. When viewed as a whole there is a broad perspective of what happens when an over populated Europe discovers a fertile new continent. The exchange of disease, food and technology were unavoidable outcomes, with disease playing the biggest role killing off 90% of the native population. The narrative is by necessity broad and shallow, but intellectually stimulating. Entire books of material are found in a sentence or two. Those areas I have previously read about I appreciated the reinforcement and context. Those new to me I found the summary at times too brief to leave an impression. Reading history is the work of a lifetime, this is a useful map. I'll probably never think of the word "Colonial" the same, being of such variety and scope. It's the central thesis, and succeeds.

Fascinating, well written history of the colonial period. Taylor does a nice job of evenhandedly describing the various colonist vs native, colonist vs mother country, and white vs. black issues. I learned a lot. It even covers Russia's forays into Alaska, which I didn't know anything about. It was on such a macro-level that it breezed past facinating issues all too quickly, but it did its job as a survey really well.My interest level flagged in the descriptions of religious issues, but that is a matter of personal taste, the effects of religion were certainly important.

nonfiction/history.
This provides a side of history that most people don't hear about in school, and as such it makes a valuable contribution. Some of the subject matter (battles, war) is not really my milieu so I struggle to absorb parts; other parts seem repetitious and might be summed up neatly in a few paragraphs (rather than 30 pages). From a genealogical standpoint it is interesting to learn about the 5000 slaves who did escape slavery by joining the British during those years, and where they settled (Canada, Barbados, Trinidad, that odd Fort in Georgia) afterwards.

One of the best surveys of Colonial American history I've ever read. The scope is comprehensive and sweeping and it is easy to read. Our book group read it in conjunction with Guns, Germs, and Steel, which is a good accompaniment.

Perhaps I'm just getting old, but this was much less gripping than Taylor's book on the colonial era. It seemed a bit more straightforward, though still offering important correctives to the standard narrative--giving time to the loyalists and so on. Perhaps there was just too much here; it felt to me like an encyclopedic work, rather than a narrative one; there were too many short sections, and the narrative sections were over comparatively well-trodden ground.

A model work of new-style history. Taylor's book isn't a straight narrative, but it has the grip of one thanks to his eye for detail, his better than passable prose (which, in academic history, is... well, that's very high praise), and his even-handedness. The settling of North America was not a pleasant thing. As ever, the test for a work of history is whether it makes you want to read other books on the same topic, and this one did that in spades.

A friend has done an excellent review of this book, so I don't have to say anything else.

With so very many details about the colonial period in North America from such an incredibly different perspective than I got in school, this book helps make sense of some of the attitudes and institutions in place in the United States today. I'm very pleased that I learned about this book (among others) while my children are still in school and while I'm still in charge of choosing their history curriculum.

Review of: Thomas Jefferson’s Education, by Alan Taylor
by Stan Prager (6-9-20)

Here was buried Thomas Jefferson, Author of the Declaration of American Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom & Father of the University of Virginia.

Thomas Jefferson wrote those very words and sketched out the obelisk they would be carved upon. For those who have studied him, that he not only composed his own epitaph but designed his own grave marker was—as we would say in contemporary parlance—just “so Jefferson.” His long life was marked by a catalog of achievements; these were intended to represent his proudest accomplishments. Much remarked upon is the conspicuous absence of his unhappy tenure as third President of the United States. Less noted is the omission of his time as Governor of Virginia during the Revolution, marred by his humiliating flight from Monticello just minutes ahead of British cavalry. Of the three that did make the final cut, his role as author of the Declaration has been much examined. The Virginia statute—seen as the critical antecedent to First Amendment guarantees of religious liberty—gets less press, but only because it is subsumed in a wider discussion of the Bill of Rights. But who really talks about Jefferson’s role as founder of the University of Virginia?
That is the ostensible focus of Thomas Jefferson’s Education, by Alan Taylor, perhaps the foremost living historian of the early Republic. But in this extremely well-written and insightful analysis, Taylor casts a much wider net that ensnares a tangle of competing themes that not only traces the sometimes-fumbling transition of Virginia from colony to state, but speaks to underlying vulnerabilities in economic and political philosophy that were to extend well beyond its borders to the southern portion of the new nation. Some of these elements were to have consequences that echoed down to the Civil War; indeed, still echo to the present day.
Students of the American Civil War are often struck by the paradox of Virginia. How was it possible that this colony—so central to the Revolution and the founding of the Republic, the most populous and prominent, a place that boasted notable thinkers like Jefferson, Madison and Marshall, that indeed was home to four of the first five presidents of the new United States—could find itself on the eve of secession such a regressive backwater, soon doomed to serve as the capitol of the Confederacy? It turns out that the sweet waters of the Commonwealth were increasingly poisoned by the institution of human chattel slavery, once decried by its greatest intellects, then declared indispensable, finally deemed righteous. This tragedy has been well-documented in Susan Dunn’s superlative Dominion of Memories: Jefferson, Madison & the Decline of Virginia, as well as Alan Taylor’s own Pulitzer Prize winning work, The Internal Enemy: Slavery and the War in Virginia 1772-1832. What came to be euphemistically termed the “peculiar institution” polluted everything in its orbit, often invisibly except to the trained eye of the historian. This included, of course, higher education.
If the raison d'être of the Old Dominion was to protect and promote the interests of the wealthy planter elite that sat atop the pyramid of a slave society, then really how important was it for the scions of Virginia gentlemen to be educated beyond the rudimentary levels required to manage a plantation and move in polite society? And after all, wasn’t the “honor” of the up-and-coming young “masters” of far greater consequence than the aptitude to discourse in matters of rhetoric, logic or ethics? In Thomas Jefferson’s Education, Taylor takes us back to the nearly forgotten era of a colonial Virginia when the capitol was located in “Tidewater” Williamsburg and rowdy students—wealthy, spoiled sons of the planter aristocracy with an inflated sense of honor—clashed with professors at the prestigious College of William & Mary who dared to attempt to impose discipline upon their bad behavior. A few short years later, Williamsburg was in shambles, a near ghost town, badly mauled by the British during the Revolution, the capitol relocated north to “Piedmont” Richmond, William & Mary in steep decline. Thomas Jefferson’s determination over more than two decades to replace it with a secular institution devoted to the liberal arts that welcomed all white men, regardless of economic status, is the subject of this book. How he realized his dream with the foundation of the University of Virginia in the very sunset of his life, as well as the spectacular failure of that institution to turn out as he envisioned it is the wickedly ironic element in the title of Thomas Jefferson’s Education.
The author is at his best when he reveals the unintended consequences of history. In his landmark study, American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804, Taylor underscores how American Independence—rightly heralded elsewhere as the dawn of representative democracy for the modern West—was at the same time to prove catastrophic for Native Americans and African Americans, whose fate would likely have been far more favorable had the colonies remained wedded to a British Crown that drew a line for westward expansion at the Appalachians, and later came to abolish slavery throughout the empire. Likewise, there is the example of how the efforts of Jefferson and Madison—lauded for shaking off the vestiges of feudalism for the new nation by putting an end to institutions of primogeniture and entail that had formerly kept estates intact—expanded the rights of white Virginians while dooming countless numbers of the enslaved to be sold to distant geographies and forever separated from their families.
In Thomas Jefferson’s Education, the disestablishment of religion is the focal point for another unintended consequence. For Jefferson, an established church was anathema, and stripping the Anglican Church of its preferred status was central to his “Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom” that was later enshrined in the First Amendment. But it turns out that religion and education were intertwined in colonial Virginia’s most prominent institution of higher learning, Williamsburg’s College of William & Mary, funded by the House of Burgesses, where professors were typically ordained Anglican clergymen. Moreover, tracts of land known as “glebes” that were formerly distributed by the colonial government for Anglican (later Episcopal) church rectors to farm or rent, came under assault by evangelical churches allied with secular forces after the Revolution in a movement that eventually was to result in confiscation. This put many local parishes—once both critical sponsors of education and poor relief—into a death spiral that begat still more unintended consequences that in some ways still resonate to the present-day politics and culture of the American south. As Taylor notes:

The move against church establishment decisively shifted public finance for Virginia. Prior to the revolution, the parish tax had been the greatest single tax levied on Virginians; its elimination cut the local tax burden by two thirds. Poor relief suffered as the new County overseers spent less per capita than had the old vestries. After 1790, per capita taxes, paid by free men in Virginia, were only a third of those in Massachusetts. Compared to northern states, Virginia favored individual autonomy over community obligation. Jefferson had hoped that Virginians would reinvest their tax savings from disestablishment by funding the public system of education for white children. Instead county elites decided to keep the money in their pockets and pose as champions of individual liberty. [p57-58]

For Jefferson, a creature of the Enlightenment, the sins of medievalism inherent to institutionalized religion were glaringly apparent, yet he was blinded to the positive contributions it could provide for the community. Jefferson also frequently perceived his own good intentions in the eyes of others who simply did not share them because they were either selfish or indifferent. Jefferson seemed to genuinely believe that an emphasis on individual liberty would in itself foster the public good, when in reality—then and now—many take such liberty as the license to simply advance their own interests. For all his brilliance, Jefferson was too often naïve when it came to the character of his countrymen.
Once near-universally revered, the legacy of Thomas Jefferson often triggers ambivalence for a modern audience and poses a singular challenge for historical analysis. A central Founder, Jefferson’s bold claim in the Declaration “that all men are created equal” defined both the struggle with Britain and the notion of “liberty” that not only came to characterize the Republic that eventually emerged, but gave echo with a deafening resonance to the French Revolution—and far beyond to legions of the oppressed yearning for the universal equality that Jefferson had asserted was their due. At the same time, over the course of his lifetime Jefferson owned hundreds of human beings as chattel property. One of the enslaved almost certainly served as concubine to bear him several offspring who were also enslaved, and she almost certainly was the half-sister of Jefferson’s late wife.
The once popular view that imagined that Jefferson did not intend to include African Americans in his definition of “all men” has been clearly refuted by historians. And Jefferson, like many of his elite peers of the Founding generation—Madison, Monroe, and Henry—decried the immorality of slavery as institution while consenting to its persistence, to their own profit. Most came to find grounds to justify it, but not Jefferson: the younger Jefferson cautiously advocated for abolition, while the older Jefferson made excuses for why it could not be achieved in his lifetime—made manifest in his much quoted “wolf by the ear” remark—but he never stopped believing it an existential wrong. As Joseph Ellis underscored in his superb study, American Sphinx, Jefferson frequently held more than one competing and contradictory view in his head simultaneously and was somehow immune to the cognitive dissonance such paradox might provoke in others.
It is what makes Jefferson such a fascinating study, not only because he was such a consequential figure for his time, but because the Republic then and now remains a creature of habitually irreconcilable contradictions remarkably emblematic of this man, one of its creators, who has carved out a symbolism that varies considerably from one audience to another. Jefferson, more than any of the other Founders, was responsible for the enduring national schizophrenia that pits federalism against localism, a central economic engine against entrepreneurialism, and the well-being of a community against personal liberties that would let you do as you please. Other elements have been, if not resolved, forced to the background, such as the industrial vs. the agricultural, and the military vs. the militia. Of course, slavery has been abolished, civil rights tentatively obtained, but the shadow of inequality stubbornly lingers, forced once more to the forefront by the murder of George Floyd; I myself participated in a “Black Lives Matter” protest on the day before this review was completed.
Perhaps much overlooked in the discussion but no less essential is the role of education in a democratic republic. Here too, Jefferson had much to offer and much to pass down to us, even if most of us have forgotten that it was his soft-spoken voice that pronounced it indispensable for the proper governance of both the state of Virginia and the new nation. That his ambition extended only to white, male universal education that excluded blacks and women naturally strikes us as shortsighted, even repugnant, but should not erase the fact that even this was a radical notion in its time. Rather than disparage Jefferson, who died two centuries ago, we should perhaps condemn the inequality in education that persists in America today, where a tradition of community schools funded by property taxes meant that my experience growing up in a white, middle class suburb in Fairfield, CT translated into an educational experience vastly superior to that of the people of color who attended the ancient crumbling edifices in the decaying urban environment of Bridgeport less than three miles from my home. How can we talk about “Black Lives Matter” without talking about that?
The granite obelisk that marked Jefferson’s final resting place was chipped away at by souvenir hunters until it was relocated in order to preserve it. A joint resolution of Congress funded the replacement, erected in 1883, that visitors now encounter at Monticello. The original obelisk now incongruously sits in a quadrangle at the University of Missouri, perhaps as far removed from Jefferson’s grave as today’s diverse, co-ed institution of UVA at Charlottesville is at a distance from the both the university he founded and the one he envisioned. We have to wonder if Jefferson would be more surprised to learn that African Americans are enrolled at UVA—or that in 2020 they only comprise less than seven percent of the undergraduate population? And what would he make of the white supremacists who rallied at Charlottesville in 2017 and those who stood against them? I suspect a resurrected Jefferson would be no less enigmatic than the one who walked the earth so long ago.
Alan Taylor has written a number of outstanding works—I’ve read five of them—and he has twice won the Pulitzer Prize for History. He is also, incidentally, the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor of History at the University of Virginia, so Thomas Jefferson’s Education is not only an exceptional contribution to the historiography but no doubt a project dear to his heart. While I continue to admire Jefferson even as I acknowledge his many flaws, I cannot help wondering how Taylor—who has so carefully scrutinized him—personally feels about Thomas Jefferson. I recall that in the afterword to his magnificent historical novel, Burr, Gore Vidal admits: “All in all, I think rather more highly of Jefferson than Burr does …” If someone puts Alan Taylor on the spot, I suppose that could be as good an answer as any …

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At the time, the American Revolution wasn't an obviously good thing, and the people were deeply divided over its value and objectives. This book shows that, plus how the thirteen colonies fit into the wider picture of the rest of the New World of its time.

The War of 1812 is the American war that people know the least about. This book provides a deep-dive into the origin and execution of the war although it focusses almost exclusively on the events along the US - Canadian border. What the book does well is to tell the stories of the diverse collections of individuals involved in the war and, by doing so, it helps the reader understand the complexity of motivations and attitudes towards the war. Its detailed explanations of battles and campaigns leaves you shaking your head at how ineptly the US managed this war. It also documents the horrible exploitation and betrayals of the Indian tribes caught up in the war. The weakness of the book is that by telling the story of so many individuals, it is difficult for the reader to keep track of who is being discussed and which side they were on. The book is recommended for people interested in both American and Canadian history.

American Revolutions demolishes the myths of the American Revolution as we were taught in school. It is an outstanding and very readable history of the American Revolution providing the perspectives of the British, the Loyalists, other British colonies and the diverse tribes of American Indians. This book is strongly recommended.

Mostly an account of the ways in which whites feared enslaved Africans/African Americans while insisting that there was nothing to fear because of their inherent inferiority. The British, both during the Revolution and the War of 1912, used the promise of freedom to secure aid from local enslaved people and escapees, while white Americans found in this practice additional grounds for complaint against the British. Taylor emphasizes the ways in which equality for whites harmed enslaved people—abolishing primogeniture spread slaveholding to more whites, broadening the political base supporting slavery, while also making it more likely that enslaved families would be torn apart upon the death of a wealthy owner.½

American slavery is commonly profiled in the 1850-1860 period, near its end. Taylor in this account gives a different history of slavery in the Tidewater of Virginia and Maryland from the Revolutionary War to 1832. - as such it doesn't end with a satisfying day of freedom. Or does it? Leading up to the War of 1812 and in its aftermath, American slaves fled to British war ships who then resettled them in places like Bermuda and Nova Scotia to become free citizens. Entire plantations of slaves stole way in the night and rowed in canoes out to the warships in the Chesapeake. The slaves in turn provided valuable guides and sources of military information. Slaves even returned to their plantations - at the head of armed British raiding parties - to rescue family members. The micro-stories Taylor discovered in old letters and court documents are dramatic enough for novel or movie material.

The main thesis is that the slave owning states were in constant fear of a slave uprising; it directly affected the outcome of the War of 1812 as they refused to send enough troops north to fight the British for fear of the "Internal Enemy" at home, a phrase commonly used at the time. This idea of the "Internal Enemy" in some ways lingers on to this day and it's fascinating to see where it began - the convoluted rationalizations of the Founding Fathers who fought for the Liberty from Britain to enslave others. This led to a kind of paranoia that the great sin that would one day came back to haunt them. And it did.

Outstanding example of detailed and useful historical narrative. So far as I could tell, it did not have any partisan ax to grind (I could be obtuse), as it presented both good and bad incidents dispassionately.

This is the most comprehensive book on pre-Revolutionary America that I've ever read. It covers everywhere and virtually everyone, from the Pilgrims that you always read about, to the slaves, women, and native people that are usually overlooked. It is sometimes grim reading. Europeans were frequently cruel to the natives. There's a lot about the conditions the slaves lived in. So many massacres, so much bloodshed.

But it's not all dismal. Some of it talks about politics, land speculation, exploration, trade, and social customs. Even if you thought you knew about pre-Revolutionary America, you're going to find a lot of stuff you didn't know. I enjoyed listening to this, but I think it would have been better in print with some maps. Fortunately, I know basic American geography so I was able to follow along. I really recommend this one.

The American Revolution has been canonized by Americans as the good one, the non-messy one. In fact, it was a civil war among British whites, and drew in numerous other nations, notably the Indian tribes whose land the colonists coveted; British sympathy with Indian rights was one of the grievances the colonists had. Taylor explores the various tensions in the colonies—mostly the rebel ones, but a bit into Canada and the Carribean—and how the Revolution fit into that larger story.½

A fresh authoritative interpretation of the complex series of events that led up to the war and the many problems in the following years. Everyone interested in early American history should read this book.