His Excellency - George Washington

Zusatztext “Mr. Ellis gives us a succinct character study while drawing on his extensive knowledge of Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary history to strip away the accretions of myth and contemporary extemporizing that have grown up around his subject. … Mr. Ellis refuses to judge Washington by "our own superior standards of political and racial justice" but instead tries to show how Washington was seen in his day. In doing so he gives us a visceral understanding of the era in which the first President came of age! and he shows how Washington's thinking (about the war for independence! the shape of the infant nation and the emerging role of the federal government) was shaped by his own experiences as a young soldier in the French and Indian War and as a member of the Virginia planter class. The resulting book yields an incisive portrait of the man! not the marble statue. . . His Excellency is a lucid! often shrewd take on the man Mr. Ellis calls the "primus inter pares! the Foundingest Father of them all." And it does so with admirable grace and wit.” —Michiko Kakutani! New York Times “Ellis [writes] with clarity and grace. He has a gift for reaching a broad public with substantive books on serious subjects. In [ His Excellency ]! he has done it again. This is an important and challenging work: beautifully written! lively! serious! and engaging… He has given us a book that will inspire other research! it will deepen our understanding of its subject.” —David Hackett Fischer! Boston Sunday Globe “[Ellis’s] probing biographies remain some of the most psychologically penetrating portraits of the Founding Fathers that we have. [ His Excellency ] is full of subtle inroads into the man Ellis calls the “most notorious model of self-control in all of American history! the original marble man.”–Richard Lacayo! Time “Ellis skillfully uncomplicates many convoluted subjects! including the real and passionate Washington and the myths constructed around him! the economic and social forces driving him and his fellow revolutionaries…. A distinguished addition.” —Celia McGee! Daily News Informationen zum Autor Joseph Ellis is the Pulitzer Prize_winning author of Founding Brothers. His portrait of Thomas Jefferson, American Sphinx, won the National Book Award. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, with his wife, Ellen, and their youngest son, Alex. Klappentext The author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Founding Brothers and the National Book Award-winning American Sphinx comes a landmark biography that brings to life in all his complexity the most important and perhaps least understood figure in American history--George Washington. 16 pages of photos. Chapter One Interior Regions History first noticed George Washington in 1753, as a daring and resourceful twenty-one-year-old messenger sent on a dangerous mission into the American wilderness. He carried a letter from the governor of Virginia, Robert Dinwiddie, addressed to the commander of French troops in that vast region west of the Blue Ridge Mountains and south of the Great Lakes that Virginians called the Ohio Country. He was ordered to lead a small party over the Blue Ridge, then across the Allegheny Mountains, there to rendezvous with an influential Indian chief called the Half-King. He was then to proceed to the French outpost at Presque Isle (present-day Erie, Pennsylvania), where he would deliver his message “in the Name of His Britanic Majesty.” The key passage in the letter he was carrying, so it turned out, represented the opening verbal shot in what American colonists would call the French and Indian War: “The Lands upon the river Ohio, in the Western Parts of the Colony of Virginia, are so notoriously known to be the Property of the Crown of Great Britain, that it is a Matter of equal Concern & Surprize to me, to hear that a Body o...

Product details

• Authors: Joseph Ellis, Joseph J. Ellis
• Publisher: Knopf
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 26.10.2004
• EAN: 9781400040315
• ISBN: 978-1-4000-4031-5
• No. of pages: 352
• Dimensions: 170 mm x 245 mm x 35 mm
• Subject: Non-fiction book > Philosophy, religion > Biographies, autobiographies