Drink hard, pray hard and simply vanish 
Jack Rakove
- Becoming America: The Revolution Before 1776 by Jon Butler
- Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans by Joyce Appleby
Did the 13 mainland colonies of British North America become America before their inhabitants thought of themselves as Americans? That is the question raised by these two books. Each is a work of scholarly synthesis; each deals rather uneasily with the epochal event – the Revolution – that separates their respective periods; each is finally concerned with the onset of modernity in the world’s ‘first new nation’, as Seymour Martin Lipset described the United States.
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Jack Rakove’s Original Meanings was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1997. The American Constitution is due in the summer. He teaches at Stanford.
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