In this remarkable book, Jack Rakove offers a new and revealing perspective on the men who shaped the idea of an American nation. Each portrait brims with fresh and fascinating insights: Washington as a flawed tactician but expert manager; Jack Laurens as a slave trader's son who developed a plan to recruit black soldiers; Jefferson as a powerful critic of Europe's social order but a voracious consumer of its culture.

Spanning the most crucial decades of the country's birth, Revolutionaries uses the stories of famous (and not so famous) men to capture - in a way no single biography ever could - the intensely creative period of the republic's founding.

By the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution.