A Leap in the Dark: The Struggle to Create the American Republic. By John Ferling. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. xviii, 558 pp. $30.00, isbn 0-19-515924-1.)

Abstract

A Leap in the Dark is a large, ambitious book. It represents the mature reflections of a historian who has spent an entire career on its subject. John Ferling has written a narrative account that takes his readers from the Albany Congress of 1754 to the presidential inauguration of Thomas Jefferson in 1801. It is likely to attract many general readers of the sort who are drawn to Joseph Ellis's Founding Brothers (2000) and David McCullough's John Adams (2001). I hope it does. Like Ellis or such nonacademy historians as McCullough and Walter Isaacson, Ferling is unashamedly a scholar of the great men of the revolutionary era. His previous books include studies of John Adams and George Washington, as well as Setting the World Ablaze: Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and the American Revolution (2000). These men and their like figure very strongly in the synoptic account that Ferling presents here. Without question, they and others who shared their vision have privileged, even heroic, roles in the story he tells. Perhaps our own time demands such an account. There is a book to be written (eventually) about the resurgence of this kind of history after decades of exploring the experiences of non-great, non-white, and non-male people.