Brooke Barbier is a public historian and independent scholar with a doctorate in American history from Boston College. The author of Boston in the American Revolution: A Town versus an Empire, she founded and operates Ye Olde Tavern Tours, a popular guided outing along Boston’s renowned Freedom Trail.
A concise and highly readable biography…[Hancock’s] legacy is very
much worth our remembering.
*Wall Street Journal*
[An] approachable biography…American history buffs will enjoy the
immersive portrait of Boston’s Revolutionary era.
*Publishers Weekly*
King Hancock is a vastly enjoyable work of popular history that
wears its impressive scholarship lightly. It deftly explains the
wider forces that unraveled the colonists’ close bonds with the
mother country… The book also features an almost tactile account of
what it was like to live in Boston in the eighteenth century.
*New Criterion*
A terrific book. Barbier’s meticulous research sheds light on how
one of the wealthiest men of his time made himself into a man of
the people—a politician whose genuine capacity for sensing the
popular mood commanded fierce loyalty, even as he clashed with both
Loyalists and radical Patriots. John Hancock was an important
figure, and this biography helps restore him to his proper
place.
*Robert J. Allison, author of The American Revolution: A Very
Short Introduction*
Barbier has written a fine biography, carefully guiding readers
through Hancock’s life, his political career, and the world around
him. In our politically polarized times, this founding father’s
legacy of political moderation is sure to resonate.
*Benjamin L. Carp, author of The Great New York Fire of 1776: A
Lost Story of the American Revolution*
In this lively and insightful biography, Barbier illuminates John
Hancock’s mastery of popular politics in an age of revolution.
Drawing on a rich and profound knowledge of eighteenth-century
Boston, she recovers the social world of a leader whose skills
extended far beyond his celebrated penmanship.
*Alan Taylor, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American
Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750–1804*
An exuberant biography, well told and spirited. As we follow John
Hancock through the turmoil that led to the Revolution, we see a
man guided more by a desire to charm, entertain, and curry favor
with both elites and ordinary people than by a rigid commitment to
a specific politics or ideology. In Barbier’s hands Hancock’s life
unfolds as dramatic theater.
*Sharon V. Salinger, author of Taverns and Drinking in Early
America*
Hancock’s success might seem inevitable given his resources, his
canny political sensibility, and just plain good fortune. Yet, as
Ms. Barbier suggests, biography and history are contingent. What
looks inescapable did not seem so to those who struggled to create
a new country.
*New York Sun*
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