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Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation
 by Joseph Ellis
Reviewed by Phil Nicolosi
This Pulitzer Prize-winning book highlights the human side of the founders by removing the title “fathers” and replacing it with “brothers” making this eminent group of men more accessible to the reader. It is an excellent book for teachers who are looking for an angle on the Founders which presents them as real-life, human characters during an extraordinary time period. It is also a very readable book for advanced high school students.
History teachers often struggle to get students to read good historical writing: works that are concise and compelling, that demonstrate the sometimes arduous work of a historian, and that employ sound historiography, and still find time to teach sufficient content. This book allows teachers to accomplish all of the aforementioned, and puts a human face on the oft-deified founders. Ellis also allows students to see the historian’s interpretation and use of numerous sources. From works by other historians like Gordon Wood and Gary Nash, to primary sources like letters and petitions from the Founders themselves, Ellis demonstrates that the historian’s craft of constantly reinterpreting the past is not lost in writing a book for a popular audience. As teachers and students of history, reading Founding Brothers allows us to sufficiently cover the content of several topics found in the standard high school history curriculum.
The book’s opening chapter details the famous duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. Ellis dramatic style will grab students’ attention, allowing readers to investigate the event like an episode of CSI. Ellis traces the roots of the conflict with an even hand and allows students to see that even with a wealth of documentary evidence, historians can never know exactly what happened during the actual event, but must rely on available sources to make an educated guess. Ellis frequently reminds us that our knowledge can be limited by what sources previous generations leave us. Ellis presents his reader with accounts from both the Burr and Hamilton camps and allows the readers to draw conclusions on what actually occurred on that July day.
Particularly useful for the classroom is a chapter called “The Silence.” In it, Ellis discusses the first Congress’s debate over ending the slave trade and the practice of slavery in the United States. Because episodes like this debate are not covered in traditional textbooks, this chapter allows students to see that the Founders were not infallible when it came to dealing with an institution so deeply rooted in America’s social and economic life. Ellis’s account helps dispel the myth that the United States, as historian Carol Berkin notes, “began perfect and continually got better.”
Founding Brothers is divided into six chapters with each chapter providing a behind the scenes look at a major topic. Topics range from Jefferson’s alleged “dinner party” bargain, by which support for Hamilton’s financial plan was given in exchange for the location of the national capital near Virginia, to a discussion of the complicated feud and friendship of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Each chapter is approximately forty pages in length, which allows the teacher to assign some guided weekly reading assignments. The structure of the book lets the teacher teach the book in its entirely or select chapters of interest and teach them independently. Either way, Ellis’s book will help students come to appreciate the complexity of history, as well as the complex character of the founders themselves.
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September 12th, 2007 at 3:06 pm
A great review, sure to help teachers everywhere. I’ve often thought that in spite of its limitations–particularly in terms of historiography– popular histories like this one are ideal for sparking students’ interest in American history. A great new feature on an already great website.