Ellis dives into these evils and attendant blindness to what we see easily now. He is no apologist for the hypocrisy of Jefferson and interrogates every significant Framer’s culpability for the failures of the epoch. He does so, however, with awareness that they did not see or reason with the same powers we possess.

This seems like an appropriate time to read a good overview of the American Revolution, as a lesson in what happened and why it mattered. Unfortunately, Joseph J. Ellis’s The Cause is not that book.

... masterly.

Ellis superbly captures the issues, personalities and events of the American Revolution from the perspectives of both England and the colonists in his eminently readable The Cause. Using rigorous scholarship, Ellis offers vivid portraits of and penetrating insights about this period in history, while challenging our conventional understandings of it.

Ellis's witty style and astute analysis make this essential reading for historians and enthusiasts at all levels who want to disentangle the complex historiography of the American Revolution..

... [a] richly detailed, multivoiced history.

With his characteristically graceful prose, Ellis offers a short, straightforward history of a critical decade in the nation’s youth.