Inventing America, Garry Wills
Inventing America, Garry Wills
List: $25.00 | Sale: $17.50
Club: $12.50

Inventing America
Jefferson's Declaration of Independence

Author: Garry Wills

Narrator: Tom Weitzel

Unabridged: 18 hr 11 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 01/02/2018


Synopsis

From acclaimed historian Garry Wills, author of Lincoln at Gettysburg, a celebrated re-appraisal of the meaning and the source of inspiration of The Declaration of Independence, based on a reading of Jefferson's original draft document.

Inventing America upended decades of thinking about The Declaration of Independence when it was first published in 1978 and remains one of the most influential and important works of scholarship about this founding document.  Wills challenged the idea that Jefferson took all his ideas from John Locke. Instead, by focussing on Jefferson's original drafts, he showed Jefferson's debt to Scottish Enlightenment philosophers such as Lord Kames and Francis Hutcheson, and even the metaphysics of Aristotle. Wills's close reading of the previously overlooked drafts of the Declaration have altered and deepened the meaning and consequences of the single most important document that contintues to define America.

About The Author

Garry Wills is a historian and the author of the New York Times bestsellers What Jesus Meant, Papal Sin, Why I Am a Catholic, and Why Priests?, among others. A frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and other publications, Wills is a Pulitzer Prize winner and a professor emeritus at Northwestern University. He lives in Evanston, Illinois.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Paul on July 04, 2022

In July of 1776, against the sweltering heat and humidity of a Philadelphia summer, a new nation was born. The instrument of its birth was a 1300-word document, the Declaration of Independence, the work of a shy, 33-year-old Virginian named Thomas Jefferson. Inventing America is Garry Wills’s explora......more

Goodreads review by Wally on November 05, 2018

I’m not sure how to rate or review this book. It was interesting, and I learned quite a bit from it, but for me it was not a page turner. It is an extremely academic book, intended for those with an existing knowledge that I did not have. In addition, the author frequently quotes extensive passages i......more

Goodreads review by Ted on February 26, 2021

Wills did an amazing amount of research to give us a good sense of how Thomas Jefferson would have understood his words in the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence. Instead of reading the Declaration from how we in the 21st Century hear the words and argue about them, he goes back in time to......more

Goodreads review by Mark on February 18, 2016

Wills' book presents an intellectual biography and a historical record of Jefferson and his Declaration. He parses Jefferson's document and provides the influences that went into his thinking. I found it a revelation. I was unaware of the Scottish Enlightenment and its proponents (Hutcheson, Hume) an......more

Goodreads review by Todd on December 04, 2024

Review title: Grounding the Declaration in context On the 40th anniversary of its 1978 publication, Garry Wills's study of the Declaration of Independence was republished with a new introduction by the author addressing the major criticisms (including some of his own) of the original. Suffice it to s......more


Quotes

“No one has offered so drastic a revision or so close or convincing an analysis as Wills has. . . . The results are little short of astonishing.” —Edmund S. Morgan, The New York Review of Books

“The best and most thorough analysis of the Declaration ever written.” —David Brion Davis, The New York Times Book Review

“A scintalling tour de force of historical detective work.” —Time


Awards

  • Merle Curti Award
  • National Book Critics Circle Awards