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The Quartet
- Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783-1789
- Narrated by: Robertson Dean
- Length: 8 hrs and 25 mins
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Publisher's summary
From Pulitzer Prize-winning American historian Joseph J. Ellis, the unexpected story of why the thirteen colonies, having just fought off the imposition of a distant centralized governing power, would decide to subordinate themselves anew.
We all know the famous opening phrase of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this Continent a new Nation.” The truth is different. In 1776, thirteen American colonies declared themselves independent states that only temporarily joined forces in order to defeat the British. Once victorious, they planned to go their separate ways. The triumph of the American Revolution was neither an ideological nor a political guarantee that the colonies would relinquish their independence and accept the creation of a federal government with power over their autonomy as states. The Quartet is the story of this second American founding and of the men most responsible—George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison. These men, with the help of Robert Morris and Gouverneur Morris, shaped the contours of American history by diagnosing the systemic dysfunctions created by the Articles of Confederation, manipulating the political process to force the calling of the Constitutional Convention, conspiring to set the agenda in Philadelphia, orchestrating the debate in the state ratifying conventions, and, finally, drafting the Bill of Rights to assure state compliance with the constitutional settlement.
Ellis has given us a gripping and dramatic portrait of one of the most crucial and misconstrued periods in American history: the years between the end of the Revolution and the formation of the federal government. The Quartet unmasks a myth, and in its place presents an even more compelling truth—one that lies at the heart of understanding the creation of the United States of America.
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- The Struggle to Create the American Republic
- By: John Ferling
- Narrated by: Mark Yoshimoto Nemcoff
- Length: 23 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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It was an age of fascinating leaders and difficult choices, of grand ideas eloquently expressed and of epic conflicts bitterly fought. Now comes a brilliant portrait of the American Revolution, one that is compelling in its prose, fascinating in its details, and provocative in its fresh interpretations.
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Loved every minute!
- By Richard on 03-03-15
By: John Ferling
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The Summer of 1787
- By: David O Stewart
- Narrated by: George Wilson
- Length: 10 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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David O. Stewart presents this well-researched account of the U.S. Constitution's creation not as a dry analysis of events, but as a high-powered narrative filled with dramatic intensity and larger-than-life historical figures.
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Very well done!
- By Alan on 04-20-17
By: David O Stewart
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Founding Rivals
- Madison vs. Monroe, the Bill of Rights, and the Election that Saved a Nation
- By: Chris DeRose
- Narrated by: Adam Verner
- Length: 9 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1789, James Madison and James Monroe ran against each other for Congress-the only time that two future presidents have contested a congressional seat. But what was at stake, as author Chris DeRose reveals in Founding Rivals: Madison vs. Monroe, the Bill of Rights, and the Election That Saved a Nation, was more than personal ambition. This was a race that determined the future of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the very definition of the United States of America.
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A Must for Anyone Interested in the Constitution
- By Garshom L. Arkoff on 07-09-13
By: Chris DeRose
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Henry Clay
- The Man Who Would Be President
- By: James C. Klotter
- Narrated by: James Anderson Foster
- Length: 19 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Charismatic, charming, and one of the best orators of his era, Henry Clay seemed to have it all. He offered a comprehensive plan of change for America, and he directed national affairs as Speaker of the House, as Secretary of State to John Quincy Adams - the man he put in office - and as acknowledged leader of the Whig party. As the broker of the Missouri Compromise and the Compromise of 1850, Henry Clay fought to keep a young nation united when westward expansion and slavery threatened to tear it apart. Yet, despite his talent and achievements, Henry Clay never became president.
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Wonderful book by a talented writer and historian
- By Timothy on 08-24-18
By: James C. Klotter
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The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Presidents, Part 1
- From Washington to Taft
- By: Larry Schweikart
- Narrated by: John McLain
- Length: 10 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Back by popular demand, the bestselling Politically Incorrect Guides provide an unvarnished, unapologetic overview of the topics every American needs to know. The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Presidents, Part 1 profiles America’s early presidents, from George Washington to William Howard Taft.
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Ruining History to Own the Libs
- By Dee on 11-11-20
By: Larry Schweikart
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The American Political Tradition
- And the Men Who Made it
- By: Richard Hofstadter, Christopher Lasch - foreword
- Narrated by: Kaleo Griffith
- Length: 17 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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The American Political Tradition is one of the most influential and widely read historical volumes of our time. First published in 1948, its elegance, passion, and iconoclastic erudition laid the groundwork for a totally new understanding of the American past. By writing a "kind of intellectual history of the assumptions behind American politics", Richard Hofstadter changed the way Americans understand the relationship between power and ideas in their national experience. Hofstadter was able to articulate, in a single work, a historical vision that inspired and shaped an entire generation.
By: Richard Hofstadter, and others
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A Magnificent Catastrophe
- The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America's First Presidential Campaign
- By: Edward J. Larson
- Narrated by: John Dossett
- Length: 6 hrs
- Abridged
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A Magnificent Catastrophe tells the story of the most perverse, bizarre, nail-biting, and influential election battle ever in U.S. history: America's first true presidential campaign, and a contest so important to the future of the country that Jefferson referred to it as "the second American Revolution" because the outcome resolved so much unfinished business about just what kind of government we would have. This election in many ways determined just how democratic a country we would be.
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Get this if you have to use it for a class!!!
- By Gabriel on 03-03-17
By: Edward J. Larson
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Washington's Farewell
- The Founding Father's Warning to Future Generations
- By: John Avlon
- Narrated by: John Avlon
- Length: 10 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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George Washington's Farewell Address was a prophetic letter from a "parting friend" to his fellow citizens about the forces he feared could destroy our democracy: hyper-partisanship, excessive debt, and foreign wars. Once celebrated as civic scripture, more widely reprinted than the Declaration of Independence, the Farewell Address is now almost forgotten. Its message remains starkly relevant. In Washington's Farewell, John Avlon offers a stunning portrait of our first president and his battle to save America from self-destruction.
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Very well written and performed
- By Michael Reading on 03-02-17
By: John Avlon
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This Vast Southern Empire
- Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy
- By: Matthew Karp
- Narrated by: Tom Zingarelli
- Length: 10 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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For proslavery leaders like John C. Calhoun and Jefferson Davis, the 19th-century world was torn between two hostile forces: a rising movement against bondage and an Atlantic plantation system that was larger and more productive than ever before. In this great struggle, Southern statesmen saw the United States as slavery's most powerful champion. Overcoming traditional qualms about a strong central government, slaveholding leaders harnessed the power of the state to defend slavery abroad.
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Excellent Listen
- By NCmom on 09-03-17
By: Matthew Karp
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Revolutionary Characters
- What Made the Founders Different
- By: Gordon S. Wood
- Narrated by: Scott Brick
- Length: 10 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Gordon Wood's wondrous accomplishment here is to bring these men and their times down to earth and within our reach, showing us just who they were and what drove them. In so doing, he shows us that although a lot has changed in two hundred years, to an amazing degree the virtues these founders defined for themselves are the virtues we aspire to still.
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Wood clearly dislikes Adams
- By Michael on 01-15-07
By: Gordon S. Wood
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Great!
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The Cause
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Modest history primer, wished for more substance
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The Pulitzer Prize-winning, best-selling author of Founding Brothers and His Excellency brings America’s preeminent first couple to life in a moving and illuminating narrative that sweeps through the American Revolution and the republic’s tenuous early years. John and Abigail Adams left an indelible and remarkably preserved portrait of their lives together in their personal correspondence: Both Adamses were prolific letter writers (although John conceded that Abigail was clearly the more gifted of the two), and over the years they exchanged more than 12,000 letters.
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"Real History"
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James Madison
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Great man, great ideas, muddling book
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Great!
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Modest history primer, wished for more substance
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The Pulitzer Prize-winning, best-selling author of Founding Brothers and His Excellency brings America’s preeminent first couple to life in a moving and illuminating narrative that sweeps through the American Revolution and the republic’s tenuous early years. John and Abigail Adams left an indelible and remarkably preserved portrait of their lives together in their personal correspondence: Both Adamses were prolific letter writers (although John conceded that Abigail was clearly the more gifted of the two), and over the years they exchanged more than 12,000 letters.
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"Real History"
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What causes people to forsake their country and take arms against it? What prompts their neighbors, hardly distinguishable in station or success, to defend that country against the rebels? That is the question H. W. Brands answers in his powerful new history of the American Revolution.
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Not a fresh take on the Revolution
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Over the course of his life, James Madison changed the United States three times: First, he designed the Constitution, led the struggle for its adoption and ratification, then drafted the Bill of Rights. As an older, cannier politician, he cofounded the original Republican party, setting the course of American political partisanship. Finally, having pioneered a foreign policy based on economic sanctions, he took the United States into a high-risk conflict, becoming the first wartime president and, despite the odds, winning.
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Cogently organized, meticulously balanced
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Revolutionary Summer
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The summer months of 1776 witnessed the most consequential events in the story of our country’s founding. While the thirteen colonies came together and agreed to secede from the British Empire, the British were dispatching the largest armada ever to cross the Atlantic to crush the rebellion in the cradle. The Continental Congress and the Continental Army were forced to make decisions on the run, improvising as history congealed around them. In a brilliant and seamless narrative, Ellis meticulously examines the most influential figures in this propitious moment, including George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Britain’s Admiral Lord Richard and General William Howe. He weaves together the political and military experiences as two sides of a single story, and shows how events on one front influenced outcomes on the other.
Revolutionary Summer tells an old story in a new way, with a freshness at once colorful and compelling.
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Excellent
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American Dialogue
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The story of history is a ceaseless conversation between past and present, and in American Dialogue, Joseph J. Ellis focuses the conversation on the often-asked question "What would the Founding Fathers think?" He examines four of our most seminal historical figures through the prism of particular topics, using the perspective of the present to shed light on their views and, in turn, to make clear how their now centuries-old ideas illuminate the disturbing impasse of today's political conflicts.
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A fine work, even with the editorializing
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By: Joseph J. Ellis
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James Monroe
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The extraordinary life of James Monroe: Soldier, senator, diplomat, and the last Founding Father to hold the presidency, a man who helped transform 13 colonies into a vibrant and mighty republic.
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Large and inconsistent, much like Monroe himself.
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His Excellency
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Acclaimed author Joseph J. Ellis penned the National Book Award-winning American Sphinx and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Founding Brothers, a fixture on The New York Times best seller list for an entire year, and one of the most popular history books of all time. Now this master historian turns his attention to the most exalted American hero, Founding Father and first President George Washington.
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Ellis is a known liar
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By: Joseph J. Ellis
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Passionate Sage
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John Adams, one of the Founding Fathers of our nation and its second president, spent nearly the last third of his life in retirement, grappling with contradictory views of his place in history and fearing his reputation would not fare well in the generations after his death. And indeed, future generations did slight him, elevating Jefferson and Madison to lofty heights while Adams remained way back in the second tier.
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Stays true to Audible's description
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By: Joseph J. Ellis
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The Radicalism of the American Revolution
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Grand in scope, rigorous in its arguments, and elegantly synthesizing 30 years of scholarship, Gordon S. Wood's Pulitzer Prize–winning book analyzes the social, political, and economic consequences of 1776. In The Radicalism of the American Revolution, Wood depicts not just a break with England, but the rejection of an entire way of life: of a society with feudal dependencies, a politics of patronage, and a world view in which people were divided between the nobility and "the Herd."
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Changed the Way I Think
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American Emperor
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A spellbinding storyteller, historian David O. Stewart traces the canny and charismatic Aaron Burr from the threshold of the presidency in 1800 to his duel with Alexander Hamilton. Stewart recounts Burr’s efforts to carve out an empire, taking listeners across the American West as the renegade vice president schemes with foreign ambassadors, the U.S. general-in-chief, and future presidents.
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Aaron Burr history
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Power and Liberty
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The half century extending from the imperial crisis between Britain and its colonies in the 1760s to the early decades of the new republic of the United States was the greatest and most creative era of constitutionalism in American history, and perhaps in the world. During these decades, Americans explored and debated all aspects of politics and constitutionalism - the nature of power, liberty, representation, rights, the division of authority between different spheres of government, sovereignty, judicial authority, and written constitutions.
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Provides Context for Todays Mess
- By Tad on 07-20-24
By: Gordon S. Wood
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The Last Founding Father
- James Monroe and a Nation's Call to Greatness
- By: Harlow Giles Unger
- Narrated by: Michael McConnohie
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In this lively and compelling biography, Harlow Giles Unger reveals the dominant political figure of a generation. A fierce fighter in four critical Revolutionary War battles and a courageous survivor of Valley Forge and a near-fatal wound at the Battle of Trenton, James Monroe (1751 - 1831) went on to become America's first full-time politician, dedicating his life to securing America's national and international durability.
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Readable, but more hero worship than history
- By Elaine Martin on 12-22-10
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James Madison
- A Biography
- By: Ralph Ketcham
- Narrated by: Bill Burrows
- Length: 38 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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The best one-volume biography of Madison’s life, Ketcham’s biography not only traces Madison’s career, it gives listeners a sense of the man. As Madison said of his early years in Virginia under the study of Donald Robertson, who introduced him to thinkers like Montaigne and Montesquieu, "all that I have been in life I owe largely to that man." It also captures a side of Madison that is less rarely on display.
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Narrator Too Robotic
- By Anonymous User on 09-20-21
By: Ralph Ketcham
What listeners say about The Quartet
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Debra Brady
- 01-05-17
Original Intent
This book is especially helpful for people like me attempting rely on High School US American History to navigate complicated political discussions including the Philosophy of supreme court using "original intent" as the basis for decisions regarding the constitution It was fascinating and illuminating to learn of the diversity of original intent in these first-generation leaders of our country. Thomas Jefferson thought the Constitution should be updated every 20 years in order to accommodate the changing needs and context of the population. Madison didn't even think that there needed to be a bill of rights as it wasn't enforceable. He didn't imagine that the Supreme Court would have the role of enforcing those rights. It is very interesting to hear how they managed the politics regarding these very important decisions. I think every American should read this book. It's very accessible!
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2 people found this helpful
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- Fleix O.
- 06-25-15
Fascinating story
Excellent story, highlighting the thoughts and actions of these remarkable men. Very well written and aerated it is a fascinating story for anyone at all interested in early American history
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1 person found this helpful
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- Rich left Miami
- 06-26-22
Yet another great American history book
aerator is very good easy to follow. a lot of facts I wasn't aware of. looking forward to reading The Federalist papers now.
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- wbiro
- 12-01-17
An Introductory Look, Good Appendices
The book covers the basics, piquing your interest (where you would pursue further books such as more in-depth individual biographies). The appendices have the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, which are always worth listening to.
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- Wayne McAllister
- 03-31-20
Excellent
Mr Ellis brings clarity to the monumental machinations of our founders in creating our Constitution.
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- Amazon Customer
- 03-09-20
best book in years
an incredible book about a part of American history most people don't even know happened. Very well written and performed.
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- John A. Ryan
- 10-25-16
Extremely Pertinent in today's United States
My second listen was more intense than the first.
My initial review was that anyone who quotes. the Constitution, Federalist Papers or writings by Jefferson or believes what they hear or see from the media, political organizations or politicians regarding these sources should listen to or read this book before they begin to throw them around. There are historians who do not agree with Ellis and again if you are going to live or die by these sources, again you should read those opposing views and make your own choice. Besides run on sentences these are strong facts.
In the last 20 or 30 years I have seen quotes regarding the Constitution, especially by Jefferson, who was in France before and long after the Constitution was written. Due to his position in the planter class, landed gentry , he had a vested interest in maintaining the Article's of Confederation. Therefore had no idea of the structure or negotiations and compromising that went into it.
I believe the book is well-written and well narrated and a must read.
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4 people found this helpful
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- David S. Mathew
- 07-02-17
After the Revolution
This is an absolutely fascinating look at a period of American history that is far too often glazed over. Also, Robertson Dean's narration is wonderful. If you want to learn more about the history of the Constitution, this is a must. Highly recommended!
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2 people found this helpful
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- William
- 04-10-16
Good intro to how our nation was really born
Our independence came from revolution, but our nation was founded on unity and tolerance.
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- Ed Q
- 01-24-18
Great read for history buffs
Interesting story, great perspective, great analysis, good narrator. Should-read for great insight into the meaning of the Constitution, and how we should interpret it today.
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