It has been ten years since H. W. Brands complained in The Atlantic about "Founders Chic," or the interminable flood of adulatory works on the same five or six dead white Founding Fathers. (These include Ben Franklin, of course, whom Brands lauded as "The First American" in his 2000 biography.) Yet there seems no stopping the market for books on the Founders, even if recent years have seen a trend toward collective biography or narrative histories of the Revolution and Constitution rather than straightforward great-man biographies.
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