4 vol set by Gordon Wood (3 SIGNED volumes)

Limited time offering. This set includes 4 volumes by Gordon Wood:

1. The Radicalism of the American Revolution by Gordon Wood – SIGNED
2. Revolutionary Characters by Gordon Wood 
3. Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson by Gordon Wood – SIGNED
4. Empire of Liberty: A History of Early Republic 1789-1815 by Gordon Wood – SIGNED

CONDITION: The books are NEW and in shrink wrap, just have a few minor flaws, such as minor fading and scratches to the gilded page edges. 3 of the volumes are SIGNED by author.

1. In The Radicalism of the American Revolution, a grand and readable synthesis of historical, political, cultural, and economic analysis, Gordon Wood describes the events that made the American Revolution. Wood depicts a revolution that was about much more than a break from England, rather it transformed an almost feudal society into a democratic one, whose emerging realities sometimes baffled and disappointed its founding fathers.

2. Revolutionary Characters offers a series of brilliantly illuminating studies of the men who came to be known as the founding fathers. Each life is considered in the round, but the thread that binds the work together and gives it the cumulative power of a revelation is this idea of character as a lived reality for these men.

For these were men, Gordon Wood shows, who took the matter of character very seriously. They were the first generation in history that was self-consciously self-made, men who understood the arc of lives, as of nations, as being one of moral progress. They saw themselves as comprising the world’s first true meritocracy, a natural aristocracy as opposed to the decadent Old World aristocracy of inherited wealth and station.

3. Gordon Wood, the great historian of the American Revolution, tells their story in Friends Divided, a majestic dual biography of these great men, whose partnership helped birth a nation and whose subsequent falling-out did much to fix its course.

John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died on the same day. And it was no ordinary day. It was the Fourth of July, 1826, exactly fifty years from the date the Continental Congress approved the Declaration of Independence, or as Daniel Webster referred to it in his eulogy of the two men, “the great day of National Jubilee.”

Arguably no relationship in America’s history carries as much freight as Adams and Jefferson. Gordon Wood, the great historian of the American Revolution, tells their story in Friends Divided, a majestic dual biography of these great men, whose partnership helped birth a nation and whose subsequent falling-out did much to fix its course.

4. As the American Revolution drew to a close, Revolutionary leaders sought to carve out a new, distinct national identity from the existing, repressive European powers—and an experiment began. The experiment was not one performed by scientists in the laboratory but rather one that took place in the crucible of American life. Gordon Wood’s Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 opens at the signing of the Constitution and traces this republican experiment through the conclusion of the War of 1812. Wood posits, “By 1815 Americans had experienced a transformation in the way they related to one another and in the way they perceived themselves and the world around them.”