Jack Rakove

Revolutionaries Jack Rakove

In the early 1770s, the men who invented America were living quiet, provincial lives. But when events in Boston escalated, they found themselves thrust into a crisis that moved from protest to war. In Revolutionaries, historian Jack Rakove shows how the private lives of these men were suddenly transformed into public careers-how Washington became a strategist, Franklin a pioneering cultural diplomat, Madison a sophisticated constitutional thinker, and Hamilton a brilliant policymaker. Spanning the two crucial decades of the country's birth, this book uses little-known stories of these men to capture the intensely creative period of the republic's founding. From the Boston Tea Party to the First Continental Congress, Trenton to Valley Forge, Rakove explores the competing views of politics, war, diplomacy, and society that shaped our nation.