Two Ships

“Provocative . . . essential reading for today’s polarized times.” —Henry Louis Gates, Jr.“This is a brilliant conceit, wonderfully executed. . . . David S. Reynolds has found a new and compelling way to explore the infinite complexities of the American story—complexities that shape us still.” —Jon MeachamA revelatory history of American division through the prism of two ships once widely used as symbols in the war of ideas between North and South—a struggle whose echoes remain with us todayIn the bitterly polarized decades leading up to the American Civil War, it was commonplace to argue that America’s strife could be traced back to the arrival of two ships, less than a year apart—The White Lion, which brought the first enslaved Africans to Jamestown in 1619, and the Mayflower, which brought the Pilgrims to Plymouth Rock in 1620.In a deeper sense, David S. Reynolds shows us, in this magnificent book, those two ships, invoked by Frederick Douglass and many others, stood for two quite d