Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Ellis (Founding Brothers) connects readers with history to enable them to formulate salient questions for the pivotal debate about U.S. destiny-a conversation he hopes to revitalize. There should be constant dialog about the past and present, he argues, but during these divided times, Americans lack a sense of national unity and the ability to converse about the present and future, informed by the past. Drawing from his intimate knowledge of the Founding Fathers, Ellis addresses four 21st-century obstacles to reveal truths from their writings that should infuse wisdom into present-day debate: Thomas Jefferson's inconsistency on slavery and race; John Adams's warnings about financial aristocracy and economic inequality; James Madison's politically expedient concessions and the idea of original intent; and George Washington's approach to national and foreign policy, and the incompatibility of American imperialism with revolutionary ideals. Each discussion relates the historical lessons to the ongoing problem. Finally, Ellis explains why the ingenious but flawed founders were uniquely suited for revolution and government-creating. VERDICT Ellis's compelling historical examples and astute analysis will raise questions and ignite debate. This work should be read by academics and general readers alike. [See Prepub Alert, 4/23/18.]-Margaret Kappanadze, Elmira Coll. Lib., NY © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

The founders have much to tell us about current problems, none of it simple, according to this incisive study of American political creeds. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Ellis (American Sphinx) probes the writings of four Revolutionary War leaders on issues of ideology and governance that still roil America. Thomas Jefferson's hypocritical racial attitudes-he both deplored slavery (while owning dozens of slaves, some of them his own children) and believed that blacks could not live with whites as equals-frame Ellis's discussion of the menace of modern racism; John Adams's doubts about the feasibility of achieving true social equality underpin a look at rising economic inequality since the Reagan administration; James Madison's attempts to convert the early U.S. from a federation to a nation-state spark a critique of Supreme Court conservatives' originalist philosophy of jurisprudence; and George Washington's weary realism about popular passions, human fallibility, and the difficulty of spreading republican values to foreign lands prompts a dissection of the failures of recent American military adventures. Ellis's passions sometimes show, as in his criticism of Justice Antonin Scalia's writings on the Second Amendment. Still, his colorful, nuanced portraits of these outsized but very human personalities and shrewd analyses of their philosophies make for a compelling case for the troubled but vital legacy of the founding generation. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

In American Dialogue, Ellis makes an argument for the continued relevance of historical education. The author writes in the preface ("My Self-Evident Truth") that he organized the book around the notion that the American Revolution "produced the Big Bang that created all the planets and orbits in our political universe." Ellis contends that one can identify the origins of contemporary political crises in the moral attitudes and political structures established by the founding generation. The book is structured as a series of discussions between the past and the present: contemporary racism is examined in relation to Jefferson's white supremacy; economic inequality is placed in the context of John Adams's reflections on freedom and property; the gridlock of political institutions is juxtaposed to the attitude of pragmatic compromise that allowed Madison to shepherd the Constitution through ratification; and Washington's foreign policy realism is used to illuminate the ambivalence of American globalism in the post--Cold War world order. Ellis's approach is reductive in that he ignores intervening historical development in an effort to show the continued relevance of the Revolution. Nevertheless, the book is charmingly written and would be a perfect catalyst for discussion in an introductory course on American history. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates; general readers. --Samuel Paul Harshner, Marquette University

Eliis (Revolutionary Summer, 2013), a Pulitzer Prize-winning and best-selling historian, is aware of the difficulties and dangers implicit in seeking answers to our current debates and dilemmas in the archives of the Founding Fathers, yet he attempts to do so here, and his effort to apply the views of four historical icons to current political conflicts is interesting and useful. On the topic of racial relations, Ellis refers to Thomas Jefferson and seems to delight in pointing out Jefferson's inconsistencies and contradictions on the topic. Considering political equality, Ellis turns to John Adams, who didn't view equality as the natural political order and didn't share Jefferson's faith in the wisdom of the people; in fact, he viewed a very powerful executive as necessary to protect the public from both an emerging elite and themselves. On foreign policy, Ellis turns to Washington, who strove to manage foreign relations with Native nations and maintain American neutrality between France and Britain. Ellis is provocative and interesting and reminds us that our present controversies are not unique or new. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Ellis joins other best-selling historians currently seeking perspective, including Doris Kearns Goodwin, with a sure-to-be roundly publicized examination of American conundrums.--Jay Freeman Copyright 2018 Booklist

An eminent historian sharply illuminates the "messy moment" of the nation's founding and its implications for contemporary America.Ellis (Emeritus, History/Mount Holyoke Coll.; The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783-1789, 2015, etc.), winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, offers a lucid and authoritative examination of America's tumultuous beginnings, when the Founding Fathers grappled with issues of race, income inequality, law, and foreign policyall issues that still vex the nation. Believing that history is "an ongoing conversation between past and present," the author asks what Jefferson, Washington, Madison, and Adams can teach us today. "What did all men are created equal' mean then and now? Did the pursuit of happiness' imply the right to some semblance of economic equality? Does it now?" These and other salient questions inform Ellis' vivid depiction of the controversies swirling as the Constitution was drafted and ratified. The Founders were men of deep contradictions and evolving political views. As a young man, for example, Jefferson "insisted that the central principles of the American Revolution were inherently incompatible with slavery." The older Jefferson, who owned hundreds of slaves and fathered many children with his slave Sally Hemings, fervently believed that races should not mix. Slaves should be freed, he conceded, and then sent to the unpopulated West, Santo Domingo, or Liberia. As to equality, the Founders "were a self-conscious elite" who did not value "the innate wisdom of the common man." John Adams' "prognosis for the American future was a plutocratic aristocracy." Freedom to pursue wealth, he asserted, "essentially ensured the triumph of inequality." Ellis places Washington's famous warning against foreign entanglements in the context of westward expansion, Native American removal, and postwar negotiations. Most fascinating is the author's cogent critique of constitutional originalists, intent on recovering "the mentality and language of the framers on their own terms in their own time."A discerning, richly detailed inquiry into America's complex political and philosophical legacy. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

if the historian Joseph J. Ellis has a project - an unfairly pedestrian term to describe his rich body of work - it is to restore to the nation's founders some measure of their humanity. In books like "Founding Brothers," which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001, and "American Sphinx," a brilliantly drawn portrait of Jefferson, Ellis renders the founders in fine shadings: wise and bold and prescient, yes, but also, at times, blinkered and uncertain, men in conflict with one another and even themselves. Ellis is not a revisionist; he is not pulling down statues from their pedestals. He does not begrudge the founders their disagreements or the fact that more than two centuries later, so many of their arguments remain unresolved. As he writes in his newest book, "American Dialogue," the founding generation's "greatest legacy is the recognition that argument itself is the answer." Like his previous histories, "American Dialogue" follows particular founders into (and not always out of) hard-fought and consequential disputes. But in one key respect this book is a departure: Ellis's subject is not only the founding era, but also our own, and the "ongoing conversation between past and present." In chapters labeled "then," Ellis considers Jefferson's contemptible views on race, Adams's premonitions about the rise of an American aristocracy and the emergence of a grossly unequal society, Madison's belief in the Constitution as a "living document" and Washington's brand of foreign policy realism. In chapters labeled "now," he listens for echoes of these ideas in 21st-century America. This, it turns out, is a dispiriting exercise: Mostly what Ellis hears is noise. Our civic dialogue has broken down, Ellis observes, and our "divided America," contentious in all the wrong ways, is "currently incapable of sustained argument" on any subject - the kind of argument that goes somewhere other than round and round, the kind that yields understanding and possibly, over time, solutions. One of the liveliest debates in American history, which Ellis has described before, took place in the letters Adams and Jefferson exchanged during their final 14 years of life, between 1812 and 1826 (the two men died, as legend and fact both have it, on the same day, July 4, 50 years after declaring America's independence). Ellis returns to their correspondence in "American Dialogue," focusing on Jefferson's romantic notion that economic and social equality would be the natural order of American life and Adams's retort that "as long as property exists, it will accumulate in individuals and families.... The snow ball will grow as it rolls." Jefferson's was the prevailing view at the time. Meanwhile Adams's "prophecy," as Ellis notes, struck most of his peers as "so bizarre and thoroughly un-American ... that it served as evidence for the charge that he had obviously lost his mind." Adams saw no way to prevent the consolidation of wealth and power by American oligarchs, but he did believe it could and must be moderated - regulated - by a strong national government. There can be no question whose forecast was right. Jefferson's ideal of an egalitarian, agrarian society was an anachronism before the 19th century was out, while the Gilded Age, near that century's end, provided garish confirmation of Adams's insight. So, of course, does the current age. Türning his attention to the present, Ellis paints a vivid if familiar picture of the redistribution of wealth to the top of the income scale, as well as the abandonment - indeed the denigration - of Adams's belief that, in Ellis's words, "the free market required regulation for capitalism to coexist with the egalitarian expectations of democracy." And here, the dispassionate historian calmly takes the gloves off. Since the 1980s, Ellis argues, the political right has engaged in a persistent, well-funded and "radically revisionist" act of historical fraud, painting government as "demonic" in the eyes of its creators. Faced by the reality that Adams anticipated - deep, endemic, expanding inequality - conservatives peddle Jeffersonian remedies, like the crippling of federal power. Ellis thinks the right has been so successful in selling this "extreme version of capitalist theology" that it has, to a meaningful degree, shut down the centuries-old debate about the role of government. The advocates of regulation and economic reform have been shouted down and shoved to the sidelines, Ellis contends, turning "mainstream politics" into "a one-sided conversation, a muted version of the American Dialogue." Ellis sees the same dynamic at work in another vast area: the law. The book traces Madison's "evolutionary odyssey from 1786 to 1789," an extraordinary period in which Madison stage-managed the Constitutional Convention and the ratification debate, wrote a substantial portion of the Federalist Papers and drafted the Bill of Rights. Along the way, as Ellis recounts, Madison was forced to part with his deeply held belief in federal supremacy and to embrace, instead, the blurrier concept of dual sovereignty - the idea of a nation caught, eternally, somewhere in the balance between state and federal authority. Madison came to see this tension as the genius of the Constitution: "the great asset," as Ellis puts it, "that ensured the argument could never end" and granted future generations the freedom to interpret the Constitution in ways that were relevant to changing circumstances. As Jefferson wrote, "laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind." It would never have occurred to Madison, therefore, that the Constitution should dictate every answer or foreclose all debate, no matter what is said at meetings of the Federalist Society or in Supreme Court confirmation hearings. As Ellis argues, the prevailing conservative doctrine of "originalism" is a pose that rests on a fiction: the idea that there is a "single source of constitutional truth back there at the founding," easily discovered by any judge who cares to see it. As a historian, Ellis takes particular offense at the machinations made by Justice Antonin Scalia in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) - a sophist's masterpiece of an opinion that concluded the founders sought to arm the American people without limit and without end. Though Scalia is gone, his ideology remains ascendant, while Madison's heirs, the proponents of a "living Constitution," are "on the permanent defensive." History, to that end, is bastardized, sanitized and turned into talking points. Ellis has addressed current issues before, in interviews and essays. (The chapter on originalism draws on a 2010 Washington Post op-ed.) But never in his books. It will no doubt be jarring for some readers to find, amid mentions of the Ordinance of 1784 and Shays' Rebellion, references to the Koch brothers and police brutality. But Ellis writes with insight and acuity in the present tense, just as he always has in the past tense, and in "American Dialogue" he draws connections between our history and our present reality with an authority that few other authors can muster. It may cost him some of his readership on the right, but Ellis, clearly, has reached the limit of his tolerance for the mythical, indeed farcical, notion that the anti-Federalists won the argument in the late 18 th century, or that the founders, to a man, stood for small and weak government, unrestrained market capitalism, unfettered gun ownership and the unlimited infusion of money into the political sphere. There is a healthy argument to be had about the legacy of the founders, but as this book makes clear, it has to start with the facts. Ellis's subject is not only the founding era but also the discussion between past and present. JEFF shesol, the author of "Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court," is currently at work on a book about the space race of the early 1960s.