Catherine Drinker Bowen’s Miracle at Philadelphia (1966) remains the unsurpassed popular history of the Convention, but...
A careful account of how the Founders fashioned America’s central document.
Only a decade after gaining independence from Britain, the 13 colonies found their loose alignment under the Articles of Confederation utterly deficient. They were unable to levy taxes, regulate trade, settle border and navigational disputes, raise a military or issue a common currency. A taxpayer revolt turned bloody in Massachusetts and the still formidable threat of Spain and England in North America helped accelerate calls to amend the Articles. During a humid Philadelphia summer and under a rule of secrecy, 55 delegates from 12 states (Rhode Island demurred) exceeded their authority, scrapped the unwieldy Articles and wrote instead a charter of government for and by the people. Attorney Stewart focuses on how this “assembly of demi-gods” (Jefferson’s phrase) reconciled the vast differences among the states—large vs. small, slave vs. free, agricultural vs. mercantile—and adjusted federal and state powers accordingly. Two towering figures, Washington and Franklin, lent their prestige to the convention. With the exceptions of Madison and Hamilton, history’s notice of the rest (the likes of Gouverneur Morris, Roger Sherman, David Brearley and three distinguished dissenters, George Mason, Elbridge Gerry and Edmund Randolph) centers on their contributions to the convention’s unprecedented deliberations. Stewart touches lightly on the delegates’ personalities; he’s at his best discussing the wrangling that resulted in a document simultaneously “the child of lofty idealism and rough political bargains.” The delegates didn’t get everything right. The notorious three-fifths rule embedded slavery in the charter; it required a civil war to expunge this injustice, and the Founders’ conception of the presidency has been frequently, though less violently, amended. Still, history’s first written constitution has proven remarkably durable.
Catherine Drinker Bowen’s Miracle at Philadelphia (1966) remains the unsurpassed popular history of the Convention, but Stewart’s highly readable narrative need defer to little else.Pub Date: April 10, 2007
ISBN: 0-7432-8692-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2007
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.
A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
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