Freedom Just Around the Corner:
A New American History 1585-1828

“The creation of the United States of America is the central event of the past four hundred years.”

With this statement, Walter A. McDougall begins Freedom Just Around the Corner, a grand narrative rich with new details and insights about colonial and early national history. McDougall marshals the latest scholarship and writes in a style redolent of passion, pathos, and humor in pursuit of truths often obscured in books burdened with political slants.

Freedom Just Around the Corner: A New American History 1585-1828
By Walter A. McDougall
ISBN: 0060197897 • Mar 2004
HB $29.95 | PB $17.95

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With an insightful approach to the nearly 250 years spanning America’s beginnings, McDougall offers his readers an understanding of the uniqueness of the “American character” and how it has shaped the wide-ranging course of historical events. McDougall explains that Americans have always been in a unique position of enjoying “more opportunity to pursue their ambitions… than any other people in history.” Throughout Freedom Just Around the Corner the character of the American people shines, a character built out of a freedom to indulge in the whole panoply of human behavior. The genius behind the success of the United States is founded on the complex, irrepressible American spirit.

Published March 30, this volume is the first installment of a trilogy that will eventually bring the story of America up to the present day, and the third to emerge from FPRI’s History Institute and Center for the Study of America and the West. Previous volumes include: From Plato to NATO: The Idea of the West and Its Opponents, by David Gress, and Promised Land, Crusader State, by McDougall. In progress is a volume entitled Is There Still a West?, edited by Harvey Sicherman and William Anthony Hay, based on a recent FPRI conference.

A complimentary signed copy of Freedom Just Around the Corner is available upon request to FPRI Patrons (members at the $500 level).

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About the Author

Walter A. McDougall is co-chairman of FPRI’s History Institute, Senior Fellow at FPRI, and the Alloy-Ansin Professor of International Relations at the University of Pennsylvania. His book The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age won a Pulitzer Prize. His other books have also won critical acclaim, including Promised Land, Crusader State: America’s Encounter with the World Since 1776 and Let the Sea Make a Noise: A History of the North Pacific from Magellan to MacArthur.