Imaginary Friendship in the American Revolution

Download or read book Imaginary Friendship in the American Revolution written by Colin Nicolson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-12-07 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imaginary Friendship is the first in-depth study of the onset of the American Revolution through the prism of friendship, focusing on future US president John Adams and leading Loyalist Jonathan Sewall. The book is part biography, revealing how they shaped each other’s progress, and part political history, exploring their intriguing dangerous quest to clean up colonial politics. Literary history examines the personal dimension of discourse, resolving how Adams’s presumption of Sewall’s authorship of the Loyalist tracts Massachusettensis influenced his own magnum opus, Novanglus. The mystery is not why Adams presumed Sewall was his adversary in 1775 but why he was impelled to answer him.