Public Lives, Private Virtues

Public Lives, Private Virtues surveys portraits of American Revolutionary heroes in books, magazines, and school texts from 1782 to 1832 and relates these sketches to cultural changes of the period. Faced with rapid and sometimes unsettling change, historians, biographers, and editors of period offered their readers narrative and visual portraits of heroes, hoping to promote classical civic virtues during a time when business-minded Americans increasingly pursued individual gain. The fifty years