I've always been interested in history, but in high school I found American history to be incredibly boring. It was often presented as a black and white affair, completely scrubbed of any nuance. It was only after discovering the true complexity of our history that I began to find it fascinating, and there are few who portray this complexity as well as historian Joseph Ellis. This meant that his newest book, The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution , was an immediate must-read. Ellis, the author of numerous other books on U.S. history, takes on the story of how we came to have our Constitution. This development was far from inevitable, he asserts, and would have been an unlikely outcome after the Revolutionary War had it not been for the efforts of four individuals. Washington, future Supreme Court Chief Justice John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and James Monroe all worked both publicly and behind the scenes to ensure that the Constitution came into being. Bo...
Occasional author. Lover of coffee.