Publisher Description
In The Birth of the Republic, 1763–89, Edmund S. Morgan shows how the challenge of British taxation started Americans on a search for constitutional principles to protect their freedom, and eventually led to the Revolution. By demonstrating that the founding fathers' political philosophy was not grounded in theory, but rather grew out of their own immediate needs, Morgan paints a vivid portrait of how the founders' own experiences shaped their passionate convictions, and these in turn were incorporated into the Constitution and other governmental documents. The Birth of the Republic is the classic account of the beginnings of the American government, and in this fourth edition the original text is supplemented with a new foreword by Joseph J. Ellis and a historiographic essay by Rosemarie Zagarri.
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About Edmund S. Morgan
Edmund Sears Morgan, an eminent
authority on early American history, was a professor of history at Yale
University, where he taught from 1955 to 1986. He specialized in American
colonial history, with some attention to English history, and was noted for his
incisive writing style. In 1971 he was awarded the Yale Chapter of Phi Beta
Kappa’s William Clyde DeVane Medal for outstanding teaching and scholarship,
considered one of the most prestigious teaching prizes for Yale faculty. In
1972 he became the first recipient of the Douglass Adair Memorial Award for
scholarship in early American history, and in 1986 he received the
Distinguished Scholar Award of the American Historical Association. He became a
Sterling Professor, one of Yale’s highest distinctions, in 1965. He received
the Gold Medal for History from the American Academy of Arts and Letter, and he
was awarded the 2000 National Humanities Medal by President Bill Clinton for
“extraordinary contributions to American cultural life and thought.” In 2006,
he won a special Pulitzer Prize citing “a creative and deeply influential body
of work as an American historian that spans the last half century.”