A D: A MEMOIR CL by K Millet

A D: A MEMOIR CL by K Millet

In mid-April 1814, the Virginia congressman John Randolph of Roanoke had reason to brood over his family's decline since the American Revolution. The once-sumptuous world of the Virginia gentry was vanishing, its kinship ties crumbling along with its mansions, crushed by democratic leveling at home and a strong federal government in Washington, D.C. Looking back in an effort to grasp the changes around him, Randolph fixated on his stepfather and onetime guardian, St. George Tucker.

The son of a wealthy Bermuda merchant, Tucker had studied law at the College of William and Mary, married well, and smuggled weapons and fought in the Virginia militia during the Revolution. Quickly grasping the significant changes--political democratization, market change, and westward expansion--that the War for Independence had brought, changes that undermined the power of the gentry, Tucker took the atypical step of selling his plantations and urging his children to pursue careers in learned professions such as law. Tucker's stepson John Randolph bitterly disagreed, precipitating a painful break between the two men that illuminates the transformations that swept Virginia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Drawing upon an extraordinary archive of private letters, journals, and other manuscript materials, Phillip Hamilton illustrates how two generations of a colorful and influential family adapted to social upheaval. He finds that the Tuckers eventually rejected wider family connections and turned instead to nuclear kin. They also abandoned the liberal principles and enlightened rationalism of the Revolution for a romanticism girded by deep social conservatism. The Making and Unmaking of a Revolutionary Family reveals the complex process by which the world of Washington and Jefferson evolved into the antebellum society of Edmund Ruffin and Thomas Dew.

Kate Millett is an American feminist writer, artist, and activist. Her most recent books are Mother Millett, A.D.: A Memoir, and The Politics of Cruelty: An Essay on the Literature of Political Imprisonment. She is director of the Millett Center for the Arts and lives in New York City and upstate New York.

Catharine A. MacKinnon is the Elizabeth A. Long Professor of Law at Michigan Law School and the long-term James Barr Ames Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.

Rebecca Mead is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of My Life in Middlemarch and One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780393035247
ISBN 10	0393035247
Title	A D: A MEMOIR CL
Author	K Millet
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	WW Norton & Co
Year published	1995-08-17
Number of pages	325
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.