We’re whitewashing the history of our founding, says Leslie Harris

by Leslie M. Harris

"It’s fueling problems today.”

Nick Bunker Wins $50,000 2015 George Washington Book Prize

The prize for the best writing on early American history is for Bunker’s "An Empire on the Edge: How Britain Came to Fight America" (Knopf).

Stephen Brumwell wins George Washington Book Prize

Stephen Brumwell has won the $50,000 George Washington Book Prize for his biography of the first president, George Washington: Gentleman Warrior (Quercus).A historian who was born in Portsmouth, England, and now lives in Amsterdam, Brumwell received the award at a ceremony last night at Mount Vernon.The jurors’ citation said, “In the hands of this fine biographer, Washington emerges as a flesh and blood man, more impressive than the mythical hero could ever be.”...

Starr Center Announces Finalists for 2013 George Washington Book Prize

Chestertown, Md — George Washington as a feisty young frontier soldier, the U.S. as an infant world power, the founding era as seen through the eyes of Thomas Jefferson’s favorite daughter, and Jefferson himself as an American nationalist – these are the subjects of four exciting new works named finalists for the 2013 George Washington Book Prize, a $50,000 award that recognizes the best recent book on the nation’s founding era.Washington College today announced this year’s finalists as Stephen Brumwell’s George Washington: Gentleman Warrior (Quercus), Eliga H. Gould’s Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire (Harvard), Cynthia A. Kierner’s Martha Jefferson Randolph, Daughter of Monticello: Her Life and Times (UNC) and Brian Steele’s Thomas Jefferson and American Nationhood (Cambridge). All four books were published in 2012.Co-sponsored by Washington College, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and George Washington’s Mount Vernon, the award is the largest nationwide for a book on early American history, and one of the largest literary prizes of any kind. It recognizes the past year’s best books on the nation’s founding, especially those that have the potential to advance broad public understanding of American history....