But how does one properly acknowledge the pleasure one finds in such books? Or in the works of those front-rank historians who have written with such extraordinary insight on the nation’s founding time—Edmund Morgan, Gordon Wood, Bernard Bailyn, Pauline Maier, Richard Ketchum, David Hackett Fischer, to name only a few? Or how to describe adequately the delight of immersing oneself, as I have tried to do, in the writing of the eighteenth century—to read again after long years, or for the first time, the writers John Adams read and loved—Swift, Pope, Defoe, Addison, Fielding, Richardson, Sterne,
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