In the Founders’ Footsteps
Adam Van Doren received his masters at Columbia University and has
been a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome. He teaches
art at Yale University, where he is also an associate fellow, and
has exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.,
among other institutions. His work is included in the collections
of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston,
the Wadsworth Atheneum, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He is
the author of The House Tells the Story: Homes of the American
Presidents, The Stones of Yale, and An Artist in Venice. Mr. Van
Doren lives in New York City.
Nathaniel Philbrick is the author of Travels with George, In the
Heart of the Sea, winner of a National Book Award, Bunker Hill, and
many other outstanding works of nonfiction.
Praise for In the Founder’s Footsteps
“An odyssey in words and pictures through landmarks of the American
Revolution . . . Van Doren has a knack for revealing relics of the
Revolution as strangely, beautifully alive.”
—Wall Street Journal
“Van Doren’s project reminds us there is always something
new to be found in America’s past that also brings greater clarity
to our present, and to the future we choose to make as a
nation.”
—Fine Art Connoisseur
“Van Doren’s watercolors give the book visual appeal, and the
window it opens on the lives of these places, past and present,
makes it worth keeping around.”
—The New Criterion
“The historian’s task is to give unnecessary attention to a
thousand and one things and still give warmth to the narrative. Van
Doren fulfills this task in excess, and his inexhaustible supply of
enthusiasm gives life to his stories.”
—David McCullough, author of 1776
“This is not just a pretty book—though Adam Van Doren’s many
watercolors are pretty indeed—but is wise and fascinating too,
reminding us of events and way-stations that we well knew—Concord
to Yorktown by way of Bunker Hill and Valley Forge—and of places
and happenings we have long forgotten. The seven years of the
Revolutionary War are retold with a measured sympathy—no jingoism
here!—and we must be grateful for the images and words of a
supremely able historian and artist.”
—Simon Winchester, author of The Professor and the Madman
“In this gorgeous volume, Adam Van Doren illustrates with
generosity and wise beauty those places and “gentle phantoms”—from
Bunker Hill to the Georgia swamp, from Phillis Wheatley to Thomas
Paine—that helped create an American republic and inhabit it still.
In Van Doren’s delicious, brilliant retelling, and in these
luminous pictures, history walks again, upright, complex, and
humane: Not to be missed.”
—Brenda Wineapple, author of The Impeachers
“Adam Van Doren has succeeded where so many histories do not, in
conveying a vivid sense of the different places that gave rise to
our hard-won independence. John Adams famously argued that the
Revolution had to be won in the “minds and hearts” of the American
people; this lovely book appeals to both.”
—Ted Widmer, author of Lincoln on the Verge
“In the Founders’ Footsteps is a visual and narrative revelation.
It invites you to join Van Doren on a journey that he quite happily
and gracefully illustrates for you. For history and architectural
buffs, this is a feast. For any reader interested in a rare and
wide-ranging road trip, this is their book.”
—Timothy L. O’Brien, author of TrumpNation
“Adam Van Doren’s charming watercolors and essays made me feel I
was there. Through both pen and brush, Van Doren not only teaches
us a good deal of American history but, more important, evokes
it.”
—Anne Fadiman, author of Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader
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