“In this masterpiece of intellectual and cultural history, Casey King brilliantly traces the tensions and profound changes in the meaning of ‘ambition’ from Elizabethan England to the Declaration of Independence. Long associated with sin, vice, avarice, and all threats to social stability, ambition acquired new connotations as the Spanish and English colonized the New World and then compared themselves with Indians and African slaves. Written with clarity and elegance, Ambition, A History combines astonishing sources and discoveries with larger economic and political contexts usually missing from the history of ideas.”—David Brion Davis, author of Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World
~David Brion Davis
"Truly ground-breaking, vital, profound, deeply nuanced and subtle. . . one of the most important and original manuscripts I’ve ever read."—John Stauffer, author of
Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln
“Extremely important, deeply researched, very well-written, and, yes, extraordinarily ambitious. . . King offers a compelling explanation of how ambition became transformed from a sin or vice into a potential (if doubled-edged) virtue that could be harnessed for positive ends.”—Steven Mintz, author of Moralists and Modernizers: America's Pre-Civil War Reformers
~Steven Mintz
"Being ambitious is for better or worse a peculiarly American characteristic. This important book helps us understand where we have been and where we are going at a crucial moment for our culture and our role in the world."—Lawrence H. Summers, Charles W. Eliot University Professor, Harvard University, and former Secretary of the Treasury of the United States
~Lawrence H. Summers
