DOC Still I Rise: A Cartoon History of African Americans by Roland Owen Laird; Taneshia Nash Laird; Elihu Bey in History

Description

The long-awaited biography of the frontier Founding Father whose heroic actions and neglected writings inspired an entire generation from Paine to Madison. On May 10; 1775; in the storm-tossed hours after midnight; Ethan Allen; the Revolutionary firebrand; was poised for attack. With only two boatloads of his scraggly band of Vermont volunteers having made it across the wind-whipped waters of Lake Champlain; he was waiting for the rest of his Green Mountain boys to arrive. But with the protective darkness quickly fading; Allen determined that he hold off no longer. While Ethan Allen; a canonical hero of the American Revolution; has always been defined by his daring; predawn attack on the British-controlled Fort Ticonderoga; Willard Sterne Randall; the author of Benedict Arnold; now challenges our conventional understanding of this largely unexamined Founding Father. Widening the scope of his inquiry beyond the Revolutionary War; Randall traces Allen’s beginning back to his modest origins in Connecticut; where he was born in 1738. Largely self-educated; emerging from a relatively impoverished background; Allen demonstrated his deeply rebellious nature early on through his attraction to Deism; his dramatic defense of smallpox vaccinations; and his early support of separation of church and state. Chronicling Allen’s upward struggle from precocious; if not unruly; adolescent to commander of the largest American paramilitary force on the eve of the Revolution; Randall unlocks a trove of new source material; particularly evident in his gripping portrait of Allen as a British prisoner-of-war. While the biography reacquaints readers with the familiar details of Allen’s life―his capture during the aborted American invasion of Canada; his philosophical works that influenced Thomas Paine; his seminal role in gaining Vermont statehood; his stirring funeral in 1789―Randall documents that so much of what we know of Allen is mere myth; historical folklore that people have handed down; as if Allen were Paul Bunyan. As Randall reveals; Ethan Allen; a so-called Robin Hood in the eyes of his dispossessed Green Mountain settlers; aggrandized; and unabashedly so; the holdings of his own family; a fact that is glossed over in previous accounts; embellishing his own best-selling prisoner-of-war narrative as well. He emerges not only as a public-spirited leader but as a self-interested individual; often no less rapacious than his archenemies; the New York land barons of the Hudson and Mohawk Valleys. As John E. Ferling comments; “Randall has stripped away the myths to provide as accurate an account of Allen’s life as will ever be written.” The keen insights that he produces shed new light; not only on this most enigmatic of Founding Fathers; but on today’s descendants of the Green Mountain Boys; whose own political disenfranchisement resonates now more than ever. 16 pages of illustrations