Edward J Larson

"From the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian comes a masterful, first-of-its-kind dual biography of Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, illuminating their partnership's enduring importance. Theirs was a three-decade-long bond that, more than any other pairing, would forge the United States. Vastly different men, Benjamin Franklin-- an abolitionist freethinker from the urban north-- and George Washington-- a slaveholding general from the agrarian...

From a Pulitzer Prize winner, a powerful history that reveals how the twin strands of liberty and slavery were joined in the nation's founding. New attention from historians and journalists is raising pointed questions about the founding period: was the American revolution waged to preserve slavery, and was the Constitution a pact with slavery or a landmark in the antislavery movement? Leaders of the founding who called for American liberty are scrutinized...

The 1800 presidential election, the last great contest of the founding period, was so convulsive and so momentous for American democracy that Jefferson would later dub it "America's second revolution." America's first true presidential campaign gave birth to our two-party system and etched the lines of partisanship that have shaped American politics ever since. The contest featured two of our most beloved Founding Fathers, once warm friends, facing...

The Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the Scopes Trial and the battle over evolution and creation in America's schools In the summer of 1925, the sleepy hamlet of Dayton, Tennessee, became the setting for one of the twentieth century's most contentious courtroom dramas, pitting William Jennings Bryan and the anti-Darwinists against a teacher named John Scopes, represented by Clarence Darrow and the ACLU, in a famous debate over science, religion,...