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Title: In the Name of the Father

Subtitle: Washington's Legacy, Slavery, and the Making of a Nation

Author: François Furstenberg

Narrator: Michael Prichard

Format: Unabridged

Length: 10 hrs and 1 min

Language: English

Release date: 09-01-06

Publisher: Tantor Audio

Ratings: 3.5 of 5 out of 6 votes

Genres: History, American

Publisher's Summary:

How did people in our country, North and South, East and West, come to share a remarkably durable and consistent common vision of what it meant to be an American in the first 50 years after the Revolution? How did the nation respond to the problem of slavery in a republic? In the Name of the Father immerses us in the rich, riotous world of what François Furstenberg calls civic texts, the patriotic words and images circulating through every corner of the country in newspapers and almanacs, books and primers, paintings, and even the most homely of domestic ornaments. We see how the leaders of the founding generation became "the founding fathers", and how their words, especially George Washington's, became America's sacred scripture. And we see how the civic education they promoted is impossible to understand outside the context of America's increasing religiosity.

In the Name of the Father is filled with vivid stories of American print culture, including a wonderful consideration of the first great American hack biographer-cum-bookseller, Parson Weems, author of the first blockbuster Washington biography. But François Furstenberg's achievement is not limited to showing what all these civic texts were and how they infused Americans with a national spirit - what Abraham Lincoln so famously called "the mystic chords of memory". He goes further to show how the process of defining the good citizen in America was complicated and compromised by the problem of slavery. Ultimately, we see how reconciling slavery and republican nationalism would have fateful consequences that haunt us still, in attitudes toward the socially powerless that persist in America to this day.

Critic Reviews:

"In the deluge of founding-father books, Furstenberg's blend of high-brow intellectual history and popular culture studies stands out; rather than lionize Washington, it advances an important argument about his role in shaping American political identity." (Publishers Weekly)

Members Reviews:

Washington and American Nationalism at Work

Francois Furstenberg's In the Name of the Father explores the themes of American nationalism and slavery in the Early Republic era of the United States. Ever since the generations of Americans that experienced the American Civil War passed away, the successive generations have had no direct connection with slavery existing in their midst. For the preceding generations of Americans, reconciling the fact that slavery was enshrined in the Constitution while at the same time it and other documents of the Revolutionary era extolled the concepts of freedom and liberty was problematic. How could slavery exist in a nation that prided itself on liberty? Modern Americans have a very difficult time understanding just how slavery flourished and was such a profitable economic enterprise that a civil war was waged over the extension of the institution into federal territories.

Furstenberg begins by explaining how the death of George Washington and his position as Father of his Country was established as a basis for nationality while also linking slavery to Washington's legacy. Washington's death took place during one of the most heated political climates in the nation's history.