Writers Rediscover New York’s Revolutionary Past

Ever since David McCullough’s 2001 book on John Adams sold more than 1.6 million copies in hardcover, there has been a vogue for biographies of the nation’s Founding Fathers. Benjamin Franklin alone has been the subject of recent books by Gordon Wood of Brown University, Joyce Chaplin of Harvard, Edmund Morgan of Yale, and David Waldstreicher of Temple. A senior editor of Publishers Weekly, Sarah Gold, said she “keeps waiting for the whole thing to burn itself out,” but “it definitely seems that we’re in the middle of a trend.”Though professors continue to churn out academic works, biography isn’t just for scholars. Journalists have also produced a slew of books on the Founding Fathers. A HarperCollins executive, James Atlas, who is himself a respected biographer and whose Eminent Lives imprint began with biographies of Jefferson by the journalist Christopher Hitchens and of Washington by the polymath Paul Johnson, said another new book on the founders “seems to be coming out every day.”In just the past year, books by journalists have included a life of Alexander Hamilton by the award-winning biographer Ron Chernow, a book on Adams by the financial writer Jim Grant, a biography of Washington’s wartime aide General Nathanael Greene by the New York Observer city editor Terry Golway, and a life of Franklin by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Stacy Schiff (coming two years after an earlier book on Franklin by a former Time magazine managing editor, Walter Isaacson). Commentary managing editor Gary Rosen has published a book on Madison, and books on the Founding Fathers’ religious convictions by Beliefnet’s editor in chief, Steven Waldman, and on Samuel Adams by The New York Sun’s managing editor, Ira Stoll, are forthcoming. Next month, a senior editor of National Review, Richard Brookhiser, will publish “What Would the Founders Do?: Our Questions, Their Answers.”Mr. Chernow gives special credit to the huge success of Mr. McCullough’s book on Adams, which he says “accelerated the process” of reawakening interest in the Founding Fathers both for the reading public and popular authors.But these journalists have more in common than their subject matter – in addition, they all live or work in New York City. A lot of Revolutionary War history took place in their backyards. New York was the nation’s first capital, and Washington was inaugurated as president at Federal Hall on Wall Street. Hamilton attended King’s College (now Columbia) and represented New York at the Constitutional Convention. Even Franklin spent time in New York as a teenager before settling in Philadelphia.These writers also have a wealth of research facilities in New York, among them the New York Public Library, the New-York Historical Society, and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.Though journalists are more used to producing history’s first rather than final draft, Mr. Brookhiser – who has also written books about Washington, Hamilton, the Adams family, and Gouverneur Morris – is comfortable writing about the founding of the republic. “On my day job,” he said, “I write about live politicians. I think that can be helpful in writing about dead politicians. Journalism teaches you what politicians are like, what a deal was, what a stab in the back was.”Today, many journalists, academic historians, and publishers agree that books on our revolutionary past express, as Ms. Gold said, a “secret, collective sense that we don’t have leaders [now] like the Founding Fathers and won’t again.”But Mr. Brookhiser pointed out that they also serve to dampen a “kind of bogus nostalgia.” After all, he said, “Politicians killed each other in duels, including two signers of the Declaration of Independence and one of the Constitution. It wasn’t that a vice president accidentally shot someone, but that a vice president intentionally shot and killed one of the founders. And when Jefferson appointed Henry Brockholst Livingston, who had killed a man in a duel, to the Supreme Court, no one objected. And journalism knew both its heights in those days – ‘The Federalist Papers’ and Tom Paine’s ‘Common Sense’ – and depths as bad as today. Journalism then was often more acrid and partisan than the worst of today’s Internet blogs.”As a journalist himself, Mr. Brookhiser would know what he’s talking about. But some scholars have taken a rather dim view of nonacademic books on the Founding Fathers. A William and Mary professor and director of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Ronald Hoffman, said that while popular authors like Mr. McCullough may be “craftsmen” who produce “good reads,” they just “repeat what I know.” Perhaps without even being aware of it, Mr. Hoffman used the term “historian” repeatedly in conversation to mean scholars, implying that journalists don’t qualify as historians.“Academics have been surprised by the success of histories by those without Ph.D.s and sometimes not very kind in their comments,” said the phi lanthropist Lewis Lehrman, of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, who once ran for governor of New York.Mr. Chernow, while pointedly expressing his admiration for such academic historians as Messrs. Morgan and Wood and Bernard Bailyn, noted that scholars tend to be focused on coming up with novel interpretations of events and new positions on issues, rather than just telling the story.By contrast, journalists are “not just writing for five or six other academics in the field” a professor of history at Baruch College and author of “First Generations: Women of Colonial America,” Carol Berkin, said. Ms. Berkin also noted the widespread response by readers to the current wave of books by journalists set during a past time when “we wore the white hats,” whereas Mr. Lehrman suggested a tendency of academics to “ignore or depreciate the political tradition of this country.”Is there an end in sight for the trend of books on the Founding Fathers? By now a “copycat phenomenon” is already evident, Ms. Gold said. And no matter how well they sell, even if bookstores have special sections for books on the revolutionary era, these won’t, Mr. Stoll noted, “ever be as large as their self-help sections.”But even if the recent surge in founding father interest abates, journalists will continue to have a future in biography. Because no matter what the current publishing trend is, as Ms. Gold said: “The ability to tell a good tale and to write well helps you to get published.”

Writers Rediscover New York’s Revolutionary Past

Writers Rediscover New York’s Revolutionary Past

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