The small unsigned notice is, in its way, a perfect specimen of the problem the American literary world suffers. Or so, at least, one could assume from the prepublication notice of Brands's Heirs of the Founders that appeared in Kirkus Reviews-as mainstream a venue as exists for news about impending books. Now, the demand is that only those voices be heard. Once upon a time, the demand was that our accounts of history be opened to include obscured or oppressed voices. Too little determined to make a tale of yesterday useful for the cultural battles of today. well, what, exactly? Too little involved in the topics that should matter. And it's not for anything he's done, exactly. Brands narrates an epic American rivalry and the little-known drama of the dangerous early years of our democracy.What might be most interesting about the news, however, is the fact that the book-reviewing world seems to be slowly turning against Brands, straining to find a way to express a discomfort with his popular writing. Yet each in his own way sought to remedy the two glaring flaws in the Constitution: its refusal to specify where authority ultimately rested, with the states or the nation, and its unwillingness to address the essential incompatibility of republicanism and slavery.

Their rise was marked by dramatic duels, fierce debates, scandal and political betrayal. Together these heirs of Washington, Jefferson and Adams took the country to war, battled one another for the presidency and set themselves the task of finishing the work the Founders had left undone. South Carolina's John Calhoun, with piercing eyes and an even more piercing intellect, defended the South and slavery. Henry Clay of Kentucky, as dashing as he was ambitious, embodied the hopes of the rising West. Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, a champion orator known for his eloquence, spoke for the North and its business class. In the early 1800s, three young men strode onto the national stage, elected to Congress at a moment when the Founding Fathers were beginning to retire to their farms. Brands comes the riveting story of how, in nineteenth-century America, a new set of political giants battled to complete the unfinished work of the Founding Fathers and decide the future of our democracy From New York Times bestselling historian H.

Hw brands heirs of the founders