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Jan 02, 2018 | ISBN 9780525435976 Buy
Feb 15, 2017 | ISBN 9780385542838 Buy
Jan 02, 2018 | 1092 Minutes Buy
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Jan 02, 2018 | ISBN 9780525435976
Feb 15, 2017 | ISBN 9780385542838
Jan 02, 2018 | ISBN 9780525525059
1092 Minutes
From acclaimed historian Garry Wills, author of Lincoln at Gettysburg, a celebrated re-appraisal of the meaning and the source of inspiration of The Declaration of Independence, based on a reading of Jefferson’s original draft document.Inventing America upended decades of thinking about The Declaration of Independence when it was first published in 1978 and remains one of the most influential and important works of scholarship about this founding document. Wills challenged the idea that Jefferson took all his ideas from John Locke. Instead, by focussing on Jefferson’s original drafts, he showed Jefferson’s debt to Scottish Enlightenment philosophers such as Lord Kames and Francis Hutcheson, and even the metaphysics of Aristotle. Wills’s close reading of the previously overlooked drafts of the Declaration have altered and deepened the meaning and consequences of the single most important document that contintues to define America.
From one of America’s foremost historians, Inventing America compares Thomas Jefferson’s original draft of the Declaration of Independence with the final, accepted version, thereby challenging many long-cherished assumptions about both the man and the document. Although Jefferson has long been idealized as a champion of individual rights, Wills argues that in fact his vision was one in which interdependence, not self-interest, lay at the foundation of society. “No one has offered so drastic a revision or so close or convincing an analysis as Wills has . . . The results are little short of astonishing” —(Edmund S. Morgan, New York Review of Books)
Garry Wills is a historian and the author of the New York Times bestsellers What Jesus Meant, Papal Sin, and Why Priests?, among others. A frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and other publications, Wills is a Pulitzer Prize winner and a professor emeritus at Northwestern University…. More about Garry Wills
“No one has offered so drastic a revision or so close or convincing an analysis as Wills has. . . . The results are little short of astonishing.” —Edmund S. Morgan, The New York Review of Books “The best and most thorough analysis of the Declaration ever written.” —David Brion Davis, The New York Times Book Review“A scintalling tour de force of historical detective work.” —Time
Merle Curti Award WINNER 1978
National Book Critics Circle Awards WINNER 1978
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