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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Frank Fox probably knows how long ago we met. I have quite forgotten.He is simply a part of my life now. We correspond—real letters, not e-mail— desultorily, then at white heat for a while, then not at all for months. He turns up for lunch in Philadelphia or for a few days in Holland when I’m spending the year there. The man is an incorrigible wanderer. And gifts come, from emporia around the world, when Frank does not.The man is an incorrigible giver of gifts. And stories come with them. Stories come when Frank comes, when he sends presents, and when he writes. The man is an irrepressible storyteller. When he first thought to study Northampton County in the Revolution —or, at any rate, when he first approached me with that thought—he was not even thinking about a story, let alone about this extraordinary assemblage of stories. He was looking for guidance in mastering the craft of the academic historian.I was, of course, flattered that he wanted to do what I do. And I was more than willing to try to help him do it. But as we talked, I sensed that academic history could never quite contain him. When he asked me for some exemplary scholarly works that he might read, I suggested instead Thomas Beer’ s TheMauveDecade. I had no idea what sort of a book Frank would ultimatelywrite.I just had an idea that he should have as a model a strange book, a book unlike those that presentday professors—my peers—might write. I wanted him to begin with an odd, angular book that had its own unique voice. Frank has, in fact, mastered the technics of academic history. He has published learned articles in learned journals and scholarly essays in scholarly books. But this book is the book I wished for him when I had no idea what I wished for him. This is the book that neither of us could have envisioned when he began his apprenticeship, at an age when most of those he knew sought nothing more strenuous than a golfing retirement in a gated community in Arizona. Sweet Land of Liberty is indeed an odd book. And it does have its own voice, a voice at once tantalizing and maddening. It holds so much implicit. It is taut and resonant with the implications of the unstated.It is sturdy, even rough, yet gentle, even delicate. It sends forth dozens of tendrils, each bearing brilliantly intimative buds, a few bearing dazzling blooms. The book is not quite biography. It is not quite a history of the Pennsylvania backcountry in the Revolution.It does not go anywhere, exactly, and it does not add up to anything, exactly. It disdains argument and thesis,though it teems with submerged arguments and theses. It is not about life.It is, like all great books—even great slight books—life itself. I would say that it is a model for future studies of the Revolution,but it is not.No one will ever again spend a dozen years and more mulling over the archives of an obscure county to piece together dozens of obscure lives and bring them to life. And even if someone does, that someone will not have Frank’ s way with words. Frank commands a prose that is vigorous, quick, pungent, and strewn with arresting turns of phrase. Sometimes it gallops. Sometimes it even prances. Yet it never goes so fast that there is no time for wry reflection, or shrewd insight, or deft, damning judgment. Frank keeps a constant eye cocked for the telling hypocrisy, the enlivening instance, the revealing paradox . He is a master of the one-liner, yet his phrases are more than merely zingy.They probe.They evoke. And they lay character bare with a wondrous wisdom. Indeed, Frank’s characters come off the page with a full portion of their idiosyncrasy, meanness,and humanity, and with all their unfathomable mystery as well.He is not onlya scrupulous historian who has mined the sources assiduously but also an author who possesses a generous sympathy and a large experience of the world. His inferences from his sources are as fascinating and illuminating as they are plausible and powerful. It is as easy to concur as to admire when he says of John Wetzel—to take one example among a multitude—that the man never joined the militia because “he probably placed himself...

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