American Inheritance: Liberty and Slavery in the Birth of a Nation, 1765-1795

American Inheritance: Liberty and Slavery in the Birth of a Nation 1765-1795, by Edward J. Larson - Copyright 2023 - ISBN 9780393882209 - Hardcover, 368 pages. SIGNED FIRST EDITION From a Pulitzer Prize winner, a powerful history that reveals how the twin strands of liberty and slavery were joined in the nation’s founding. New attention from historians and journalists is raising pointed questions about the founding period: was the American revolution waged to preserve slavery, and was the Constitution a pact with slavery or a landmark in the antislavery movement? Leaders of the founding who called for American liberty are scrutinized for enslaving Black people themselves: George Washington consistently refused to recognize the freedom of those who escaped his Mount Vernon plantation. And we have long needed a history of the founding that fully includes Black Americans in the Revolutionary protests, the war, and the debates over slavery and freedom that followed. We now have that histor