If you have ever encountered the legendary anecdote concerning the youthful George Washington - who "could not tell a lie," and thus confessed to chopping down the cherry tree - and wondered where it came from, then look no further. Parson Weems' "biography" of George Washington, first distributed as a pamphlet in 1800, seems to the modern eye to be more in the way of historical fiction than legitimate history. Full of apocryphal stories that historians have long discounted, Weems' work was wildly popular in the nineteenth century, when adulation of the "Father of Our Nation" was rampant.

But in spite of its historical "fabrications", The Life of Washington still has value as an example of the nineteenth-century mythologizing of American history, and should be of interest to scholars of that period. I myself might never have stumbled across this book if it had not been assigned reading for a college course I took on the intellectual history of nineteenth-century America. (Thank you, Professor Ponce de Leon!) I’m glad that I did, as founding-father “worship” seems once again to be in vogue, making this nineteenth-century hagiography rather interesting. ( )