Pauline Maier Memorial Lecture: The Quartet

NOTE: This program will take place at MIT's Wong Auditorium at the intersection of Amherst and Wadsworth Streets in Cambridge (map). This is a four minute walk from the Kendall Square MBTA station or there is street parking along Memorial Drive and a parking garage at the Marriot Hotel in Kendall Square. 

The unexpected story of why the thirteen colonies, having just fought off the imposition of a distant centralized governing power, would decide to subordinate themselves anew. In 1776, thirteen American colonies declared themselves independent states that temporarily joined forces in order to defeat the British. Once victorious, they planned to go their separate ways. The triumph of the American Revolution was neither an ideological nor a political guarantee that the colonies would relinquish their independence and accept the creation of a federal government with power over their autonomy as states. The New York Times Best Seller The Quartet is the story of this second American founding and of the men most responsible—some familiar, such as George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison, and some less so, such as Robert Morris and Governeur Morris. Ellis gives us a gripping and dramatic portrait of one of the most crucial periods in American history: the years between the end of the Revolution and the formation of the federal government. The Quartet unmasks a myth, and in its place presents an even more compelling truth—one that lies at the heart of understanding the creation of the United States of America.

Joseph J. Ellis is a leading scholar of American history. The author of eight books, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Founding Brothers: the Revolutionary Generation and won the National Book Award for American Sphinx, a biography of Thomas Jefferson. Ellis currently teaches in the Leadership Studies program at Williams College. He previously taught at the Honors College at the University of Massachusetts, Mount Holyoke College, and the United States Military Academy at West Point.