To Begin the World Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of the American Founders - Hardcover

Bailyn, Bernard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375413774 ISBN 13: 9780375413773

Publisher: Knopf, 2003

Synopsis

With these character sketches of key figures of the American Revolution and illuminating probes of its circumstances, Bernard Bailyn reveals the ambiguities, complexities, and uncertainties of the founding generation as well as their achievements.

Using visual documentation—portraits, architecture, allegorical engravings—as well as written sources, Bailyn, one of our most esteemed historians, paints a complex picture of that distant but still remarkably relevant world. He explores the powerfully creative effects of the Founders’ provincialism and lays out in fine detail the mingling of gleaming utopianism and tough political pragmatism in Thomas Jefferson’s public career, and the effect that ambiguity had on his politics, political thought, and present reputation. And Benjamin Franklin emerges as a figure as cunning in his management of foreign affairs and of his visual image as he was amiable, relaxed, and amusing in his social life.

Bailyn shows, too, why it is that the Federalist papers—polemical documents thrown together frantically, helter-skelter, by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay in a fierce political battle two hundred years ago—have attained canonical status, not only as a penetrating analysis of the American Constitution but as a timeless commentary on the nature of politics and constitutionalism.

Professor Bailyn concludes, in a wider perspective, with an effort to locate the effect of the Founders’ imaginative thought on political reformers throughout the Atlantic world. Precisely how their principles were received abroad, Bailyn writes, is as ambiguous as the personalities of the remarkably creative pro-
vincials who founded the American nation.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

"Although the book is written with elegance and vigor, its prose is only one of its attractive qualities. Bailyn's powerful mind is on display in his analysis of the founders' history--never more so than in his essay on Jefferson, the most brilliant essay on that enigmatic man that I have ever read. As searching as that essay is, two others (of five) that use visual images--mostly portraits--show even greater daring. There is nothing commonplace about any of the essays. They all offer extraordinarily valuable insights and, taken together, a most revealing portrait of the founders of the American republic."
--Robert Middlekauff, author of Benjamin Franklin and His Enemies

"Among his many talents, Bernard Bailyn is perhaps our finest and most imaginative historical essayist, and here he brings together five brilliant meditations on problems that have long fascinated him. All involve the creativity, and some the ambiguities, of the remarkable generation who made the Revolution and wrote the Constitution. But To Begin the World Anew is more than another exercise in "founders' chic." It also asks how these deeply provincial leaders, living on the far periphery of Atlantic society, discovered such astonishing resources of intellect and political creativity."
--Jack Rakove, author of Original Meanings

“Every once in a while a book of history comes along that seems to perfectly inhabit its own sphere. This is such a book. . . Within its brief compass it delineates the world of the founding fathers with equatorial poise, clarity, and grace. Early American history is Bernard Bailyn’s choice domain, and for the past 40 years or so no one has been a better guide to the riches it can yield. . . This is a gem of a book.”
–Benson Bobrick, New York Times

“The American Founders. . . seldom have been celebrated with such depth and sophistication and with such keen awareness of their place in the larger history of Western culture.”
–Gordon Wood, New York Review of Books

“If the storms of fashion that have pounded the humanities during the last 30 years have spared the study of early American history, one of the scholars we have most to thank is Bernard Bailyn.”
–Richard Brookhiser, New York Times Book Review

“His thinking is subtle. His style is forceful. And he is not afraid to look ambiguities square in the eye.”
–Anthony Day, Los Angeles Times

“In the great flood of books about the American Revolution that has washed through publishing in the past few years, To Begin the World Anew occupies a place all its own.”
–Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World

“Deep, creative, brilliant and provocative. In a word: dazzling.”
–Bruce Clayton, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

About the Author:

Bernard Bailyn did his undergraduate work at Williams College and his graduate work at Harvard, where he is currently Adams University Professor Emeritus and director of the International Seminar on the Atlantic World. His previous books include The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century; Education in the Forming of American Society; Pamphlets of the American Revolution, 1750–1776; The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, which received the Pulitzer and Bancroft Prizes in 1968; The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson, which won the 1975 National Book Award for History; Voyagers to the West, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1987; and Faces of Revolution: Personalities and Themes in the Struggle for American Independence.

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0375413774
• ISBN 13: 9780375413773
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208