Preparatory reading for Mason & Dixon

[David Morris]

You might want to read about some of the personalities in M&D.  In addition
to the main characters, prominent ones might be George Washington &
Benjamin Franklin.  Both are humorously portrayed.

 I don't think Thomas Jefferson got portrayed, but he was one of the lead
architects of the Constitution, and a proponent of "Enlightenment"
philosophy, largely imported from France.

David Morris

On Mon, Nov 21, 2016 at 4:51 PM, Robert Mahnke <rpmahnke at gmail.com> wrote:

> This is an interesting question.  I didn't read anything in particular
> before I read M&D, so I don't think there's any background reading
> required.  But there's no fun in that answer.
>
> Apropos of that period of American history, very few Americans get much
> history about the century and a half before the Revolution.  My son took
> American History in the eighth grade a few years ago, and his textbook
> skipped from the founding of the Jamestown (Virginia) and Plymouth
> (Massachusetts) colonies in 1607 and 1620 pretty much to the Revolution
> without only a short digression about the founding of Manhattan by the
> Dutch.  This approach is pretty typical.
>
> If you want to read a good history of that period, two I can recommend are
> Bernard Bailyn's The Barbarous Years, which covers 1600 to 1675, and Daniel
> Richter's Before The Revolution.  I particularly liked the latter, which
> (IIRC) emphasized the extent to which what happened in the American
> colonies was very much affected by transatlantic trade and political
> developments in Europe.
>
> The other obvious book to read as background is Benjamin Franklin's
> autobiography
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Autobiography_of_Benjamin_Franklin>.
> And if you're going to read that, or even if you aren't, you should read
> Jill Lepore's Book Of Ages, about Franklin's sister and the limits of
> history.
>
> On Mon, Nov 21, 2016 at 1:06 PM, Alexei du Périer <
> alexei.duperier at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hello chaps,
>>
>> I am planning on reading *Mason & Dixon* soon and would like to know
>> whether there are any books I ought to read before starting in order to be
>> familiar with the historical context/figures discussed etc.
>>
>> I have never studied American history so don't know much about pre-1776
>> stuff.
>>
>> Cheers.
>>
>
>
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