In the Name of the Father: Washington's Legacy, Slavery, and the Making of a Nation

New York: Penguin Press, 2006. 335 pages, illustrations; 25 cm. Tight, clean copy. Dust jacket protected in a mylar cover. A fine copy of the first printing. "How did people in our country-North and South, East and West-come to share a remarkably durable and consistent common vision of what it meant to be an American in the first fifty years after the Revolution? How did the nation respond to the problem of slavery in a republic? In the Name of the Father immerses us in the rich, riotous world of what Francois Furstenberg calls civic texts, the patriotic words and images circulating through every corner of the country in newspapers and almanacs, books and primers, paintings and even the most homely of domestic ornaments. We see how the leaders of the founding generation became 'the founding fathers,' how their words, especially George Washington's, became America's sacred scripture. And we see how the civic education they promoted is impossible to understand outside the context of America's increasing religiosity. In the Name of the Father is filled with vivid stories of American print culture, including a wonderful consideration of the first great American hack biographer cum bookseller, Parson Weems, author of the first blockbuster Washington biography. But Francois Furstenberg's achievement is not limited to showing what all these civic texts were and how they infused Americans with a national spirit: how they created what Abraham Lincoln so famously called 'the mystic chords of memory.' He goes further to show how the process of defining the good citizen in America was complicated and compromised by the problem of slavery. Ultimately, we see how reconciling slavery and republican nationalism would have fateful consequences that haunt us still, in attitudes toward the socially powerless that persist in America to this day. / Francois Furstenberg was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up in Boston, Massachusetts, and Washington. After graduating with a BA from Columbia University, he worked for several years in Paris before pursuing his graduate studies in history at The Johns Hopkins University, where he earned his Ph.D. in 2003. He was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in U.S. history at Cambridge University, England, for one year, after which he moved to Montreal, Canada, where he is an assistant professor of history at the Universit? de Montreal." - Publisher.. 1st. Hardcover. Fine/Fine. 8vo. Collectible.