Book review: American Creation by Joseph J. Ellis

American Creation by Joseph J. Ellis (2007)

Overall
Writing		Info
Re-Listenability		Audio

Writing: The subtitle of the book is “Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic,” and Ellis sticks with that theme as he reviews various episodes in the early US — from the Revolutionary War to Louisiana Purchase — to recount unexpected triumphs that made the US an unexpectedly viable republic, and the unquestionable tragedies (dealing with Indians east of the Mississippi and the issue of slavery) where the Founders were unable (or unwilling) to do what we feel is right.

The text is folksy and episodic, easy to listen to (even if sometimes Ellis overdoes his introductory and wrap-up sections in each chapter). His theme stands up without too much propping, and he manages to treat the Founders in a way neither “idolatrous nor iconoclastic.” 

Info: Nothing stood out as a glaring inaccuracy or distortion of history from my listening. Though each chapter is relatively short, Ellis manages to include a lot of information. 

The seven “episodes” he details are: 1775, which marked a critical mass in the impulse toward independence; Washington at Valley Forge, shifting the war from a traditional European fight to a broadly dispersed insurgency that the British could not afford to fight; the Constitutional Convention, which set up a dynamic between state and federal sovereignties that still has an impact on modern US politics; the Treaty of New York with the Creek Indians, an attempt to establish a “just peace” with a large set of tribes that was doomed from the outset by American demography; the establishment of the (two) party system, which nobody claimed to want, but which quasi-conspiracies against demonized opponents made necessary; the Louisiana Purchase, which established American primacy on the continent, doomed the Indians, made inevitable the Civil War, and, ironically pushed through by Jefferson, spelled the beginning of the end for Jeffersonian states rights.

Of all of these, the Indian chapter is the most fascinating, and probably the least well-known to me, as Washington and Knox — and the other Founders on the stage — get to express their repeated desire to make something positive about relations with the Indians, and even go so far as to try to make treaties with them work, but fail due to political clashes and the rapid population growth of the American states.

Re-Listenability: The “small tales” nature of the book makes listening to it in chunks quite doable, and will make it more likely I’ll come back to it again.

Audio: John H. Meyer provides a voice both folksily conversation and erudite. Pleasant to listen to, he works with Ellis to be telling a story to the reader, rather than the reader eking a story out of the page. Judging from some of the comments, he does a good job of turning some of Ellis’ prose into a more enjoyable “listen.”

Technically, okay, though some of the sound levels between recording breaks are off a bit.

Overall: A solid historical survey by Ellis. There are no tremendously new insights here, but it’s a refreshingly entertaining review of the Founding period, and of the Founders itself. If there’s anything to critiquie, it’s that it is just a survey, sprinkled with tidbits of facts, whereas any of the individual chapters — or people — here could warrent (and have) full books of their own. But in touching on so many aspects of the Founding, Ellis does a good job in creating a bigger picture in which to examine the period and its players as a whole.