A PBC EXCLUSIVE! One of the most original, inventive, and subversive works of American history of recent times.

The editorial board and staff of Progressive Book Club are proud to offer the remarkable American Aurora, a groundbreaking history of revolutionary America. We felt so strongly that it should be made available to a wide audience that we asked its publisher, St. Martin's Press, to bring it back into print for sale to PBC members.

Forget what you think you know about the Founding Fathers; it’s all so much federalist propaganda! George Washington? A bald-faced liar and incompetent military leader. John Adams? A power-hungry monarchist. The Constitution? A sorry compromise of the revolution’s ideals and an inadequate basis for republican government. Benjamin Franklin? The true “father of his country,” who fought with Adams and his fellow crypto-monarchist Alexander Hamilton to preserve the republic. These are just some of the heresies argued (and defended) by Richard N. Rosenfeld in American Aurora, one of the most inventive and revealing books ever written about revolutionary America.

Rosenfeld, an independent scholar, recounts the controversies surrounding constitutional debates and the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 through the pages of the Philadelphia Aurora, a radical newspaper of the 1790s which led the fight for greater freedoms. His approach to the historical record is delightfully innovative—he uses daily clips from Philadelphia newspapers to portray the early struggles over civil liberties and interweaves quotations from contemporary sources, day by day. He brings vividly to life the voice of Benjamin Franklin Bache, the Aurora'’s first editor (and Benjamin Franklin’s grandson), whose political barbs led to the passing of the Sedition Act of 1798. Rosenfeld also creates a fictional voice for Aurora editor William Duane, Bache’s successor, who tells the story in the present tense and provides context for the original source material.

American Aurora is an original, even subversive, work of revisionist history. It supplies the daily details of the rancorous and often personal debate over the future of a new nation largely missing from sanitized textbooks and civics-class accounts of the period. When it was first published, in 1997, the Nation wrote, “Rosenfeld’s monumental book America Aurora . . . is an important book . . . it should be read by all who prize truth over myths, individual freedom over enforced national consensus, democracy over aristocracy.”

Praise for American Aurora

“BEST HISTORY 1997” —Los Angeles Times

“A magnificent achievement, American Aurora is both an original work of history and a rousing good story . . . The early days of the Republic will be much better understood by the publication of this remarkable book.” —Doris Kearns Goodwin, winner of the 1995 Pulitzer Prize in History

“Richard N. Rosenfeld’s strange and remarkable book, American Aurora . . . offers new and revealing perspectives on the period—subverting the heroic image of George Washington as General and President, catching as never before the ways the lure of the monarchy was felt. . . .These are no mean accomplishments.” —Gordon S. Wood, winner of the 1993 Pulitzer Prize in History, Times Literary Supplement

“Richard Rosenfeld’s story, which reads almost like fiction . . . is revisionist as history, fresh from its thorough grounding in the sources, brilliantly conceived and written, it is a remarkable retelling of the early years of the United States . . . this is an original work of history and told by a master storyteller.” —Esmond Wright, Los Angeles Times Book Review

“A riveting narrative of an epochal political struggle. American Aurora'’s firsthand evidence is as irrefutable as its rough-and-tumble you-are-there immediacy is irresistible . . . A tale of high drama that leaves the stately mythology of our Founding Fathers’ wisdom and omniscience shattered.” —Dallas Morning News

“What a daring, remarkable book it is . . . the book succeeds.” --St. Louis Post Dispatch

Review: American Aurora (Kirkus Reviews) Here is a view of America's postrevolutionary era so subversive it makes Gore Vidal look like a traditionalist: John Adams wants to be king, George Washington is a hypocrite, a standing army is a mercenary force. Yet it's not fiction--well, not totally. It is based on the Philadelphia Aurora, a newspaper founded by Benjamin Franklin's grandson, Benjamin Bache, and whose political barbs, according to independent historian Rosenfeld, led to the passing of the Sedition Act of 1798. Rosenfeld constructs a narrative in the voice of William Duane, Bache's successor, punctuated by excerpts from the Aurora itself, as well as other records of the time and the responses of those politicians targeted by the paper. The result is an odd agglomeration of texts and framing narrative, centering on the growing hostility between America and France in 1798. The bellicose Adams is castigated for an eerily familiar locution: ``We are told we must go to war [with France] in order to prevent war.'' Despite its ungainliness, this volume leaves one wondering why we have no such spirited paper as the Aurora today.

Review: American Aurora (Booklist) It is easy to bemoan the lack of civility in public discourse today, but Rosenfeld shows that our so-called founding fathers were not so polite themselves. Lost in sanitized textbooks are the daily details of the rancorous and often personal debate over the future of a new nation. Rosenfeld uses the Aurora, published in the late 1790s in Philadelphia by the grandson of Benjamin Franklin, as primary-source material. Benjamin Franklin Bache was a strident supporter of republican ideals, radical democracy, and the French Revolution. His attacks on the Federalists were scurrilous, calling George Washington incompetent and John Adams a power-hungry monarchist. James Tagg has provided an excellent analysis of Bache's role in history in Benjamin Franklin Bache and the Philadelphia Aurora (1991), but Rosenfeld lets Bache and his successor William Duane speak in their own voices. A lively selection for active history collections.

Richard N. Rosenfeld, the son and grandson of printers, was born in Boston in 1941. He is an independent scholar and the author of American Aurora. He holds degrees from Yale, Columbia, and Boston universities, and is a Member at the American Antiquarian Society.