Reviewed by Trevor Burnard | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 62.4

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Reviewed by Trevor Burnard | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 62.4 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

The Founding Fathers in Early American Historiography: A View from Abroad

Trevor Burnard, University of Sussex

Gouverneur Morris: An Independent Life. By William Howard Adams. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. 368 pages. $30.00 (cloth).

Thomas Jefferson. By R. B. Bernstein. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. 253 pages. $26.00 (cloth), $13.95 (paper).

Young Hickory: The Making of Andrew Jackson. By Hendrik Booraem. Dallas, Tex.: Taylor Trade Publishing, 2001. 344 pages. $26.95 (cloth).

Tom Paine and Revolutionary America. By Eric Foner. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. 2d edition. 326 pages. $45.00 (cloth), $28.00 (paper).

John & Edward Rutledge of South Carolina. By James Haw. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997. 385 pages. $50.00 (cloth).

John Quincy Adams: Policymaker for the Union. By James E. Lewis Jr. Wilmington, Del.: SR Books, 2001. 164 pages. $65.00 (cloth), $19.95 (paper).

Forgotten Founder: The Life and Times of Charles Pinckney. By Marty D. Matthews. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004. 186 pages. $29.95 (cloth).

Richard Henry Lee of Virginia: A Portrait of an American Revolutionary. By J. Kent McGaughy. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2004. 272 pages. $75.00 (cloth), $27.95 (paper).

Envoy to the Terror: Gouverneur Morris and the French Revolution. By Melanie Randolph Miller. Dulles, Va.: Potomac Books, 2004. 284 pages. $24.00 (cloth), $15.96 (paper).

Lafayette. By Harlow Giles Unger. Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 2002. 480 pages. $30.00 (cloth), $17.95 (paper).

Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery and the American Revolution. By David Waldstreicher. New York: Hill and Wang, 2004. 336 pages. $25.00 (cloth), $15.00 (paper).

John the Painter: Terrorist of the American Revolution. By Jessica Warner. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 2004. 320 pages. $24.95 (cloth).

An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America. By Henry Wiencek. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003. 416 pages. $26.00 (cloth), $15.00 (paper).

The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin. By Gordon S. Wood. New York: Penguin Press, 2004. 320 pages. $25.95 (cloth), $16.00 (paper).

I recently attended a performance of The History Boys, a play by British comic playwright Alan Bennett. The play is an enormous success, packing in literate middle-class audiences. The principal theme is very English: how students at an upwardly mobile boys' grammar school convince Oxbridge dons that they are deserving of the limited places available for smart students at Britain's most prestigious universities. Bennett's contention is that the key to academic success is to turn every question asked on its head, in the assumption (probably correct) that bored examiners will be overcome by admiration for such attention-grabbing ploys and will miss the shallowness of the journalistic techniques employed. The play is wickedly funny and highly contemporary in everything except in the way that history is presented. Bennett's conception of history seems to be curiously old-fashioned, being mostly about making speculative counterfactuals concerning decisions made by key individuals. If students adopted the tactics advocated by Bennett, they would stand little chance of impressing the current crop of cultural and social historians who dominate British (and American) history departments.

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