'It is one of the few works on the American Revolutionary era that recaptures some of the sweeping force of what happened at the end of the eighteenth century.' New York Review of Books

• Acknowledgments; Introduction; Part I. The Ideological Inheritance: 1. Educational theory and moral independence; 2. The transmission of ideology and the bestsellers of 1775; 3. The familial politics of the Fortunate Fall; Part II. Forms of Filial Freedom: 4. The debt of nature reconsidered; 5. Affectionate unions and the new voluntarism; 6. Filial freedom and American Protestantism; Part III. The Character of the National Family: 7. George Washington and the reconstituted family; 8. The sealing of the garden, Or the world well lost; Notes; Index.

'It is one of the few works on the American Revolutionary era that recaptures some of the sweeping force of what happened at the end of the eighteenth century.' New York Review of Books

• Acknowledgments; Introduction; Part I. The Ideological Inheritance: 1. Educational theory and moral independence; 2. The transmission of ideology and the bestsellers of 1775; 3. The familial politics of the Fortunate Fall; Part II. Forms of Filial Freedom: 4. The debt of nature reconsidered; 5. Affectionate unions and the new voluntarism; 6. Filial freedom and American Protestantism; Part III. The Character of the National Family: 7. George Washington and the reconstituted family; 8. The sealing of the garden, Or the world well lost; Notes; Index.