Ambition, A History: From Vice to Virtue
“In this masterpiece of intellectual and cultural history, Casey King brilliantly traces the tensions and profound changes in the meaning of ‘ambition’ from Elizabethan England to the Declaration of Independence. Long associated with sin, vice, avarice, and all threats to social stability, ambition acquired new connotations as the Spanish and English colonized the New World and then compared themselves with Indians and African slaves. Written with clarity and elegance,Ambition, A Historycombines astonishing sources and discoveries with larger economic and political contexts usually missing from the history of ideas.”—David Brion Davis, author ofInhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World(David Brion Davis)