Professor Ed Larson Presents "American Inheritance" -- Politics and Prose Bookstore, Washington, DC

Professor Edward J. Larson spoke on his newly published book, American Inheritance: Liberty and Slavery in the Birth of a Nation, 1765-1795, at Politics and Prose Bookstore in Washington, DC, on January 14.

From Politics and Prose Bookstore:

Liberty and slavery are twin, intertwining strands of our national DNA. At the founding of the United States, patriots espoused and fought for liberty while some of them denied it to their enslaved countrymen. Other patriots, however, would extend liberty to all. George Washington himself consistently refused to recognize the freedom of those who escaped his Mount Vernon plantation, while Benjamin Franklin, who once owned enslaved servants, turned against slavery. To make sense of the present, we look to this original sin and debate our dual inheritance: was the American Revolution fought to advance the cause of liberty, or to secure slavery in an independent United States, or both? In American Inheritance, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Edward J. Larson takes on these contradictions in a powerful, deeply researched narrative of America’s founding, from the first anti-British protests in the 1760s through George Washington’s presidency.

Edward J. Larson is the author of many acclaimed and best-selling works in American history, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning history of the Scopes Trial, Summer for the Gods. He is University Professor of History and Hugh and Hazel Darling Chair in Law at Pepperdine University, and lives with his family near Los Angeles.

Additional information may be found at Politics and Prose