And this is all a shame, since I think students would benefit significantly from reading this book, since it so ably captures the centrality of slavery to the early republic and offers a compelling reading of one of America’s least-understood events (the War of 1812). Or it would at least drastically decrease the number of other books I assign in the semester, since I try to keep the total page count to a respectful amount. I’m pretty sure if I assigned it to a group of undergrads, even in a 300-level class, it would invoke a mutiny. Though the font is rather large, there are still nearly 450 pages of text, pre-endnotes. However, I soon realized the biggest problem, which more seasoned teachers probably already know. Now that I’m prepping for this fall, when I’ll be teaching a Jeffersonian America course, I gave the idea more serious consideration. I made a mental note that this would be a great book to assign to students. (One could argue that Taylor’s biggest sin, other than the one I’m about to discuss, is hogging all the major book awards.) As one would expect given Taylor’s track record, I was floored by the book’s exhaustive research and lyrical prose. Norton, 2013), which recently won the Pulitzer Prize. One of the first things I did after finishing my dissertation a couple of months back (other than sleeping for an entire week, of course), was reading Alan Taylor’s latest tome, An Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1776-1832 (New York: W.
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