Edmund Sears Morgan

"In The Genuine Article, Edmund Morgan's first collection of essays in several decades, he presents a story that begins with the arrival of the first settlers in 1607 at the doomed Jamestown colony and ends as the Founding Fathers begin the arduous task of governing a formerly rebellious and often restless people."--BOOK JACKET.

Uses many of Washington's letters to his associates to portray his superior understanding of the nature of military and political power.

Americans did not at first cherish the idea of political severance from their mother country. In just a few years, however, they came to desire independence above all else. What brought about this change of feeling and how did it affect the lives of their citizens? To answer these questions, Edmund S. Morgan looks at three men who may fairly be called the "architects of independence," the first presidents of the United States. Anecdotes from their letters and diaries recapture the sense of close identity many early Americans felt with their country's political struggles. Through this perspective, Morgan examines the growth of independence from its initial declaration and discovers something of its meaning, for three men who responded to its challenge and for the nation that they helped create. This book, first published in 1976, has become one of the standard short works on the first three presidents of the United States George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson. When the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association and the Organization of American Historians asked 1,500 historians to name the ten best books about George Washington, this book was one of those selected. In this updated edition, the author provides a new preface to address a few remaining concerns he has pondered in the quarter century since first publication.

The men who came together to found the independent United States either held slaves or were willing to join hands with those who did. George Washington, hero of the Revolution, was the master of several hundred slaves. Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, owned more than 200 men, women, and children while eloquently defending the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In this classic work, originally published in 1976, through a meticulous history of Virginia from its earliest settlement through the seventeenth century boom in tobacco, the gradual replacement of servitude with slavery, and the rise of republican ideology, historian Morgan reveals the deep and interlocking relationship between these seemingly contradictory ideas.--From publisher description.

A definition of history discussing how it is recorded and passed on and why we study it.

Professor Morgan, in this unique collection, focuses upon three ideas that lay at the root of Puritan political theory and have had a continuing significance in our history: calling, covenant, and the separate spheres of church and state. The selections show the origin of these ideas in the writings of the early English Puritans before the colonization of America, in seventeenth century New England, and finally in new contexts in the eighteenth century. One may read these documents as primary sources of Puritan thought per se, as sources of American intellectual history, or as sources of a political theory that flowered in the early years of the new constitutional republic. - Foreword.

Winthrop and the Puritans faced a dilemma that is still pertinent today: what responsibility does a religious person owe to society?--

The Stamp Act, the first direct tax on the American colonies, provoked an immediate and violent response. The Stamp Act Crisis, originally published by UNC Press in 1953, identifies the issues that caused the confrontation and explores the ways in which the conflict was a prelude to the American Revolution.

Family life in the eighteenth century.

Describes the life and notable accomplishments of Ben Franklin, eighteenth-century American printer, statesman, writer, and inventor.

Essays written over the past thirty years assess the American Revolution's abstract and specifically contemporary importance and study factors and events seen as contributing directly to American independence and a national consciousness.