Content area
Full text
George Washington Reconsidered. Edited by Don Higginbotham. (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 2001. Pp. [xii], 336. Paper, $18.50, ISBN 0-8139-2006-X; cloth, $55.00, ISBN 0-81392005-1.)
It is arguable that serious analysis of George Washington as a person and a leader-reconsideration, if you will-rehabilitation, for that matter-began with articles by Edmund S. Morgan in the Virginia Quarterly Review in 1976 ("George Washington: The Aloof American," which is reprinted in the book under review) and by Richard H. Kohn in the West Point Alumni Magazine in 1978. Indeed, Morgan's The Genius of George Washington (New York, 1980) remains one of the best pieces ever written on the man. The edited volume under review here, George Washington Reconsidered, is consciously modeled after the only other compilation of essays on Washington, James Morton Smith's George Washington, A Profile (New York, 1969). It differs primarily insofar as it is limited to twenty-five years of historiography as opposed to a hundred and...