Two Ships - by David S Reynolds (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

"If you read only one American history book this summer . . . make it David S. Reynolds's Two Ships." --George Will, Washington Post

"Brilliant, provocative . . . Essential reading for today's polarized times." --Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

"A dazzling survey of three centuries of American history." --Maureen Corrigan, NPR

"Wonderfully executed. . . . A new and compelling way to explore the infinite complexities of the American story." --Jon Meacham

A revelatory history of American division through the prism of two ships once widely used as symbols in the war of ideas between North and South--a struggle whose echoes remain with us today

In the bitterly polarized decades leading up to the American Civil War, it was commonplace to argue that America's strife could be traced back to the arrival of two ships, less than a year apart--The White Lion, which brought the first enslaved Africans to Jamestown in 1619, and the Mayflower, which brought the Pilgrims to Plymouth Rock in 1620.

In a deeper sense, David S. Reynolds shows us, in this magnificent book, those two ships, invoked by Frederick Douglass and many others, stood for two quite distinct realities: the Puritans and the Cavaliers, names and ideologies born in the bloodshed of the English Civil War. The Virginia colony, founded by royalists, was steeped in the ideas of divine right, which flowed down in rigid patriarchal hierarchies. Plymouth Colony's dissenters to the king and his church, while hardly perfect, carried the seeds of a more egalitarian political vision.

These two ships of 1619 and 1620 played a key role in the battle of images and words that marked the roiling fight, and then war, over slavery. As Reynolds shows, there was a long stretch of time in America when everyone knew what Cavaliers and Puritans meant. It was North versus South, but more deeply, it was about whether social hierarchy was the natural order of things.

But then, as America descended into the long night of Jim Crow, the metaphor of the two ships went to sleep as well. The meaning of the Mayflower and of Thanksgiving changed as they became mainstream, apolitical ideas. If the ships' status as cultural touchpoints before the Civil War tells us something vital about that conflict, their forgetting afterward tells us much about why the road to true equality has proved so stony. By dredging up these two ships' dueling images, the great David S. Reynolds enables us to make the same use of them that Frederick Douglass and his contemporaries did to challenge us, and to give us hope that we are up to the task.

Review Quotes

"A dazzling survey of some three centuries of American history . . . Reading Two Ships would be an excellent way to observe this particular Fourth of July." --Maureen Corrigan, NPR

"Engrossing . . . With his nuanced unraveling of sometimes dauntingly tangled ideas and his always crisp prose [Reynolds] avoids the pitfalls of oversimplification and excessive detail." --Fergus Bordewich, Wall Street Journal

"Drawing on an astonishing wealth of references . . . [Two Ships is] a narrative for our time, when the aspirational vision of oneness has given way to intractable twoness." --James Traub, The Atlantic

"Captivating . . . A wonderfully original take on U.S. history." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"A highly recommended must-read, with great insights into American history and ideology." --Library Journal (starred review)

"An exploration of the contending cultures of North and South, long before the Civil War began . . . Reynolds charts the differences, setting those two ships on an inevitable collision course." --Kirkus

"An animated look at the tortured history of American slavery and its immediate aftermath . . . Excellent and fast-paced . . . A religious tug-of-war happens throughout the book, and Reynolds . . . is insightful about every aspect of it." --Open Letters

"Extremely enlightening . . . Great history. This is one of those books that will end up making you think long after you finish the final page." --History Nerds United

"In this brilliant, provocative book, David S. Reynolds resurrects the metaphor of the two ships to offer an origin story of America's deep divisions. Two Ships marks a major intervention in the study of early American history by explaining how the American people--Black and white, enslaved and free--conceptualized these divisions before, during, and after the Civil War. It's essential reading for today's polarized times." --Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

"This is a brilliant conceit, wonderfully executed. By telling the story of the White Lion and of the Mayflower, David S. Reynolds has found a new and compelling way to explore the infinite complexities of the American story--complexities that shape us still." --Jon Meacham

"With his characteristic verve and insight, David S. Reynold recovers the powerful legend of a Puritan New England of freedom pitted against a Cavalier South of slavery in an existential struggle for American identity. In selective, propulsive memories, legends became real enough to justify a civil war that still resonates within our national culture." --Alan Taylor

"Combining intellectual sweep with precise and vivid detail, our preeminent cultural historian, David S. Reynolds, has limned the revolutionary origins of the Civil War--in the English Revolution of the 1640s and 1650s as much as the American Revolution of 1776. Emphasizing the essentially monarchical character of American slavery, Two Ships traces the legendary distinction between Yankee Puritans and Southern Cavaliers as a cultural fact. Many historians pride themselves on exposing received truths about America as oppressive myths; Reynolds finds profound truths inside received myths, and he does so brilliantly." --Sean Wilentz

"David S. Reynolds's eloquent and clear-eyed history of those two ships, the White Lion and the Mayflower, and the metaphors they inspired sheds light on the difficult, painful, contested American past--then and now. A dazzling, beautifully rendered, and wholly relevant book, Two Ships stands tall on any shelf about enslavement, despair, equal rights, and, finally, national unity: a bravura heritage for our times." --Brenda Wineapple

About the Author

David S. Reynolds is a Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography, winner of the Bancroft Prize and the Ambassador Book Award. His other books include Beneath the American Renaissance, winner of the Christian Gauss Award; John Brown, Abolitionist; Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson; Mightier than the Sword: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Battle for America; and Lincoln's Selected Writings. His most recent book is Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times, the basis of the documentary Lincoln's Dilemma and winner of the Gilder Lehrman Abraham Lincoln Prize.