Conceived in Liberty Volume 1: A New Land, A New People, by Murray Rothbard (full text in PDF
The reader may be pardoned for wondering about the point of another addition to the seemingly inexhaustible flow of books and texts on American history. One problem, as pointed out in the bibliographical essay at the end of this volume, is that the survey studies of American history have squeezed out the actual stuff of history, the narrative facts of the important events of the past. With the true data of history squeezed out, what we have left are compressed summaries and the historian’s interpretations and judgments of the data. There is nothing wrong with the historian’s having such judgments; indeed, without them, history would be a meaningless and giant almanac listing dates and events with no causal links. But, without the narrative facts, the reader is deprived of the data from which he can himself judge the historian’s interpretations and evolve interpretations of his own. A major point of this and succeeding volumes is to put back the historical narrative into American history.
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This is great! Thanks alot Jeff, (Stephan for the idea), and everyone at the LvMI who’s worked on this!
Thank you for posting this as a PDF. I will still buy the hardcover volumes but it’s wonderful to have a PDF copy of the Master’s work.
The remaining 3 volumes are coming.
This might be interesting:
http://www.librarytoast.com/libthing/thingmap/mapwork.php?work=1316147
http://www.librarytoast.com/libthing/thingmap/mapwork.php?work=1316151
(Shows the locations of owners of Conceived in Liberty)
Thanks very much for this.
I have the physical volumes, but it is nice to have the .pdf files available for searching and for when you are travelling.
Excellent set of books. Gave me an excellent new perspective on early American history. My only wish was that he would have written a fifth volume covering the period of the Articles of Confederation through the first term of President Washington under the Constitution so that we could have had that unique perspective on that formative period of time.
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