Beacon Broadside

A Deeply American Experience: Excerpt from Jefferson’s Pillow

Roger Wilkins is a professor of history at George Mason University. He was cited in the 1972 Pulitzer Prize award to The Washington Post for his coverage of Watergate. The following is a short excerpt from his book Jefferson's Pillow: The Founding Fathers and the Dilemma of Black Patriotism. His book examines the founding fathers and their contradictory notions of independence and slavery in the newly-formed United States.

We Americans have a wonderful political legacy that is, in part, the work of people who owned people very much like me. It is possible that some of those they owned were among my ancestors. The lives of these founders and their characters were indelibly stained by that fact, though the heinousness of the crime may be relieved a bit by the fact that they were born into an existence anchored in slavery.

Excerpt from “The Muse of Revolution”

Nancy Rubin Stuart is an award-winning author, journalist and writer-producer who specializes in women and social history. Her previous books include The Reluctant Spiritualist, American Empress, and Isabella of Castile. In connection with her work she has appeared on several national television series and on NPR's "Morning Edition." Her articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and many national magazines. She currently serves as one of the directors of the Women Writing Women's Lives Seminar at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Stuart's book, The Muse of the Revolution: The Secret Pen of Mercy Otis Warren and the Founding of a Nation, follows Mercy Otis Warren and her connection to some of the most notable players in the American Revolution. With a sense of liberty and independence, Stuart chose the following excerpts documenting Warren's satirical poems and plays pertaining not only to the events that led to war, but also to her revolutionary ideas of women's rights.

The Muse of the Revolution