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Friday, August 06, 2010
The Making of a Nation
Their lives, fortunes and sacred honor:
Alexander Hamilton, eulogizing the renowned general Nathanael Greene in 1789, claimed that without the American Revolution, Greene’s true genius might never have been revealed. Jack Rakove, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian at Stanford University, applies Hamilton’s insight about Greene to the entire cohort of Revolutionary leaders in his elegantly written new book. Part collective biography, part narrative history of the years 1773 to 1792, “Revolutionaries” adeptly explores the factors that led these remarkable men to reject British sovereignty and create a new nation. “The Revolution made them,” Rakove asserts, “as much as they made the Revolution.”
We are nothing without opportunities, even slender ones. But similar opportunities were given to the founders of the various Latin American states. They left their nations nothing comparable to the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution or the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions.
Posted by Richard Anderson on August 6, 2010 | Permalink
Comments
They left their nations nothing comparable to the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution or the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions.
Posted by PUBLIUS on August 6, 2010 at 05:16 AM
We should take nothing for granted as everything we have taken for granted in more than a century is under siege by social engineers, activists and history revisionists. The founding fathers would roll over in their graves.
Posted by: peterj | 2010-08-07 12:35:47 AM
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