"Jack Rakove offers a new and revealing perspective on the men who invented America. Much has been written about the military struggle that led to independence, but Rakove is far more concerned with the intellectual one: the competing views of politics, war, diplomacy and society that shaped the very idea of an American nation. Spanning the most crucial decades of the country's birth, from 1772 to 1792, 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"--Jacket.