Offers a portrait of the complex, often contradictory figure of Benjamin Franklin, a man who was at once the quintessential American and a cosmopolitan lover of Europe, and a one-time loyalist turned revolutionary.

The preeminent historian of the Founding Era reflects on the birth of American nationhood and explains why the American Revolution remains so essential. For Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Gordon S. Wood, the American Revolution is the most important event in our history, bar none. Since American identity is so fluid, we have had to continually return to our nation s founding to understand who we are. In a series of illuminating essays, he explores...

"Thomas Jefferson and John Adams could scarcely have come from more different worlds, or been more different in temperament. Jefferson, the optimist with enough faith in the innate goodness of his fellow man to be democracy's champion, was an aristocratic Southern slave owner, while Adams, the overachiever from New England's rising middling classes, painfully aware he was no aristocrat, was a skeptic about popular rule and a defender of a more elitist...