Few of America's first families have guided the course of a nation as decisively as the Roosevelts. Patriots and poltroons, inventors and country squires, reformers and machine politicians, saints and sinners--Nathan Miller tells the story of those self-made aristocrats whose personal stamp has reflected and influenced America for three hundred years. They were the mirror of their day and their ancestry attests to that fact: from Dutch peasant farmers whose rustic beginnings planted the seeds of greatness, to prosperous fur traders whose descendants, by 1776, were members of the provincial congress voting for resolutions supporting independence and then ratifying the Constitution. Here too is the story of the Roosevelt women--making "good marriages," moving upward amid the powerful and prominent New York families--securing for themselves a destiny that would make the twentieth century the "Age of the Roosevelts." Making use of documents never published before, Miller presents a sweeping panorama of an American dynasty. --From publisher description.