Review: Signing Their Lives Away
This is a kind of high concept history book. Take the signers of the Declaration of Independence and do a capsule biography of each of them. It provides a way to take a slice of pro-revolution (well, mostly) Americans and dig into their lives. They are going to be relatively well documented and give some kind of a slice of life in the Colonies around 1776.
Denise Kiernan and Joseph D’Agnese do a good job running these folks down and telling their lives in pretty interesting capsules. There is a lot of variation in outlook and experience of these people. It’s a good reminder that America has never been monolithic. But the bios are necessarily short and if someone interests you, their chapter is over pretty quickly. As an invitation to reading more history, that can be effective, but I have already swallowed that pill.