American Aurora

Richard Rosenfeld's dramatic epic traces the incendiary history of the young American nation in the 1790s, and chronicles the birth and near-death of civil liberties in that turbulent decade. Rosenfeld, who has exhaustively examined the Philadelphia Aurora, has chosen as his heroes its two young editors, Benjamin Bache, Benjamin Franklin's grandson, and William Duane, who fearlessly waged a decade-long campaign to keep America's Founding Fathers true to their original mission. They claimed that George Washington was not the true "father of his country," but a completely incompetent…