At the intersection of his expertise and our need for coherence about our national founding arrives historian Joseph Ellis with his soon-to-be-released book, “The Cause: The American Revolution and Its Discontents, 1773-1783.”
The Pulitzer Prize winner has spent a lifetime in the materials of late 18th-century America. His National Book Award for “American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson” and his Pulitzer for “Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation” should credential him as a scholar even among those skeptical of the Founding Fathers for their participation in (or at least tolerance of) slavery and their uncomprehending approach to women and native tribes. Ellis dives into these evils and attendant blindness to what we see easily now. He is no apologist for the hypocrisy of Jefferson and interrogates every significant Framer’s culpability for the failures of the epoch. He does so, however, with awareness that they did not see or reason with the same powers we possess. Not even the era’s “American Prometheus” — Benjamin Franklin — could escape the stains of that time.
