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Ethan Allen

His Life and Times
by Willard Sterne Randall
Ethan Allen: His Life and Times. Norton. 2011. c.617p. illus. bibliog. index. ISBN 9780393076653. $35. BIOG
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In this work, Randall (history, Champlain Coll.) presents Ethan Allen as much more than the hero of Fort Ticonderoga, leader of the Green Mountain Boys, and founder of Vermont. A contradictory character, Allen is shown here as the outspoken defender of New York land-grant settlers against land speculators but also as a land speculator himself; as a principled champion of justice and liberty while still an ambitious, glory-seeking opportunist; as a riotous and impetuous frontiersman as well as a self-educated philosopher and religious iconoclast. Randall effectively explains Allen's beliefs and actions by chronicling the economic, religious, and political developments in Colonial New England that shaped Allen and fomented the atmosphere of rebellion before and after 1775.
VERDICT The relaxed narrative is supported by valuable primary documents and secondary sources, but Randall ignores Michael Bellesiles's Revolutionary Outlaws: Ethan Allen and the Struggle for Independence on the Early American Frontier (1993). Of greater concern, upon viewing the first submitted galley for the book, LJ pointed out to the publisher that certain passages closely followed Charles Jellison's Ethan Allen: Frontier Rebel (1969). The book has since been revised for publication, yet the new version still contains some passages that echo Jellison's narrative patterns. Nonetheless, this biography of a larger-than-life adventurer and flawed hero will be enjoyed by readers of popular histories about the country's early years, and by serious researchers in Vermont, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and New York history.
Reviewed by Margaret Kappanadze, Elmira Coll. Lib., NY , Sep 01, 2011
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