A history of American division through the prism of two ships once widely used as symbols in the war of ideas between North and South—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.
A dazzling survey of some three centuries of American history through a close reading of a metaphor ... I think reading Two Ships would be an excellent way to observe this particular Fourth of July.
An engrossing intellectual history ... His two metaphorical ships carry a heavy cargo of intellectual freight. However, with his nuanced unraveling of sometimes dauntingly tangled ideas and his always crisp prose he avoids the pitfalls of oversimplification and excessive detail.
If you read only one American history book this summer, shame on you, but make it David S. Reynolds’s Two Ships ... Reynolds’s powerful demonstration is that his story — the symbolism of the two ships — is not his. It was ubiquitous in American political rhetoric until, happily, it no longer was, as the nation transcended old categories ... Like any binary applied to a complex society, the two-ships division always obscured and distorted much ... Reynolds’s two ships, whose voyages though the nation’s memory lasted more than two centuries, have sailed far over history’s horizon. Good riddance.
