![]() But they quickly discovered that they held different and conflicting visions of that order. They truly believed that they might bring forth an unprecedented political order. ![]() ![]() The triumphant American patriots proclaimed the ideal of a virtuous republic that would be based on popular sovereignty and run by a national government with minimal formal powers led by disinterested men of talent and distinction. The book focuses on the second of Wood's two historical transitions, and it at once underscores and fleshes out in massive and arresting detail the basic contentions of his Pulitzer Prize-winning book of 1992, The Radicalism of the American Revolution. Empire of Liberty, the monumental summation of Wood's lifetime of learning, surveys with subtlety and sweep the political, social, and cultural transformations that began with the ratification of the Constitution and culminated at the end of the War of 1812. ![]() Beginning with his magisterial first book, The Creation of the American Republic (1969), Wood has developed a powerful interpretation of the era, based on what he describes as two great transitions-from the monarchical society of the colonial period to the republican society of the constitutional framers, and then to the rambunctious democracy that emerged during the presidencies of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. ![]() Wood has done more than any other scholar of his generation-and perhaps more than any scholar since Charles Beard or even Henry Adams-to redefine how historians understand the four decades that followed the outbreak of the American Revolution. ![]()
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