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The Cause

The American Revolution and its Discontents, 1773-1783

Joseph J. Ellis, Ph.D.

$49.95

Hardback

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English
Liveright
22 October 2021
In one of the most ""exciting and engaging"" (Gordon S. Wood) histories of the American founding in decades, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Joseph J. Ellis offers an epic account of the origins and clashing ideologies of America's revolutionary era, recovering a war more brutal, and more disorienting, than any in our history, save perhaps the Civil War.

For more than two centuries, historians have debated the history of the American Revolution, disputing its roots, its provenance, and above all, its meaning. These questions have intrigued Ellis-one of our most celebrated scholars of American history-throughout his entire career. With this much-anticipated volume, he at last brings the story of the revolution to vivid life, with ""surprising relevance"" (Susan Dunn) for our modern era. Completing a trilogy of books that began with Founding Brothers, The Cause returns us to the very heart of the American founding, telling the military and political story of the war for independence from the ground up, and from all sides: British and American, loyalist and patriot, white and Black.

Taking us from the end of the Seven Years' War to 1783, and drawing on a wealth of previously untapped sources, The Cause interweaves action-packed tales of North American military campaigns with parlor-room intrigues back in England, creating a thrilling narrative that brings together a cast of familiar and long-forgotten characters. Here Ellis recovers the stories of Catherine Littlefield Greene, wife of Major General Nathanael Greene, the sister among the ""band of brothers""; Thayendanegea, a Mohawk chief known to the colonists as Joseph Brant, who led the Iroquois Confederation against the Patriots; and Harry Washington, the enslaved namesake of George Washington, who escaped Mount Vernon to join the British Army and fight against his former master.

Countering popular histories that romanticize the ""Spirit of '76,"" Ellis demonstrates that the rebels fought under the mantle of ""The Cause,"" a mutable, conveniently ambiguous principle that afforded an umbrella under which different, and often conflicting, convictions and goals could coexist. Neither an American nation nor a viable government existed at the end of the war. In fact, one revolutionary legacy regarded the creation of such a nation, or any robust expression of government power, as the ultimate betrayal of The Cause. This legacy alone rendered any effective response to the twin tragedies of the founding-slavery and the Native American dilemma-problematic at best.

Written with the vivid and muscular prose for which Ellis is known, and with characteristically trenchant insight, The Cause marks the culmination of a lifetime of engagement with the founding era. A landmark work of narrative history, it challenges the story we have long told ourselves about our origins as a people, and as a nation.
By:  
Imprint:   Liveright
Country of Publication:   United States
Dimensions:   Height: 239mm,  Width: 160mm,  Spine: 36mm
Weight:   677g
ISBN:   9781631498985
ISBN 10:   1631498983
Pages:   400
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active

Joseph J. Ellis is the best-selling author of twelve previous books, including American Sphinx, which won the National Book Award, and Founding Brothers, which won the Pulitzer Prize. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, and Plymouth, Vermont.

Reviews for The Cause: The American Revolution and its Discontents, 1773-1783

The Cause comes across as a special gift, the book the author most wanted to write to the reader from the great scholar. -- Robert S. Davis - The New York Review of Books Masterly... [Ellis] deftly foreshadows all the issues that would complicate America's trajectory and ends with a historical cliffhanger: Would the Republic survive? It did, but only when the Constitution became the embodiment of The Cause....Can America be truly great if we are built on a foundation that includes slavery?... [Ellis] would say that while the Constitution contains that terrible defect, it also contains the cure for democracy's wrongs - if we choose to use it. -- Richard Stengel - The New York Times Book Review


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