The Cause: The American Revolution and its Discontents, 1773-1783

Joseph J. Ellis' The Cause is a culmination of a lifetime of engagement with the founding era, countering popular histories that romanticize the "Spirit of 76" and demonstrating that the rebels fought under the mantle of "The Cause," a mutable and ambiguous principle destined to give rise to the warring factions of later American history.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 400 pages
Publication date: 04 November 2022
Publisher: WW Norton & Co

For Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Joseph J. Ellis, The Cause represents the culmination of a lifetime of engagement with the founding era, completing a trilogy of books that began with Founding Brothers. Here, Ellis, countering popular histories that romanticize the "Spirit of 76," demonstrates through "evocative profiles of British loyalists, slaves, Native Americans, and soldiers uncertain of what was being founded" (Christopher Borrelli, Chicago Tribune) that the rebels fought not for a nation but under the mantle of "The Cause," a mutable, conveniently ambiguous principle all but destined to give rise to the warring factions of later American history. Combining action-packed tales of North American military campaigns with characteristically trenchant insight, The Cause deftly foreshadows all the issues that would complicate America's trajectory, forcing us to finally reconsider the story we have long told ourselves about our origins—as a people, and as a nation.

"At the intersection of his expertise and our need for coherence about our national founding arrives historian Joseph J. Ellis. . . . Ellis is no apologist, but he is a chronicler of the entire revolution, its best aspirations, its worst contradictions, and its ongoing dilemmas." —Hugh Hewitt, Washington Post

Weight: 316g
Dimension: 139 x 209 x 26 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781324092346