Landon Carter, a Virginia planter, left behind one of the most revealing of all American diaries. In this astonishingly rich biography, Isaac mines this remarkable document--and many other sources--to reconstruct Carter's interior world as it plunged into revolution. The aging patriarch, though a fierce supporter of American liberty, was deeply troubled by the rebellion and its threat to established order. His diary, originally a record of plantation business, began to fill with angry stories of revolt in his own little kingdom. Carter writes at white heat, his words sputtering from his pen as he documents the terrible rupture that the Revolution meant to him. Indeed, Carter felt in his heart that he was chronicling a world in decline, the passing of the order that his revered father had bequeathed to him. Not only had Landon's king betrayed his subjects, but Landon's own household betrayed him: his son showed insolent defiance, his daughter Judith eloped with a forbidden suitor, all of his slaves conspired constantly, and eight of them made an armed exodus to freedom. The seismic upheaval he helped to start had crumbled the foundations of Carter's own home. In Landon Carter's Uneasy Kingdom Rhys Isaac unfolds not only the life, but also the mental world of our countrymen in a long-distant time. Moreover, in this presentation of Landon Carter's passionate narratives, the diarist becomes an arresting new character in the world's literature, a figure of Shakespearean proportions, the Lear of his own tragic kingdom. This long-awaited work will be seen both as a major contribution to Revolution history and a triumph of the art of biography. "In Isaac's hands the story of the Revolution in a small corner of Virginia breaks into multiple competing narratives that reveal the rich interplay between the local and the Atlantic, between the personal and the political, and, above all, between lost stories told by subalterns and the recorded stories of a patriarch-master."--James Sidbury, The Journal of Southern History "A detailed, persuasive picture of a world so different from our own as to be almost unimaginable."--Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World "A major contribution to the study of the American Revolution....Readers will be fascinated by Carter's impassioned narratives, masterfully placed in their time by Isaac's brilliant analysis. This admirable study joins Claire Tomalin's Samuel Pepys as an example of the finest scholarly analysis of personal diaries."-- Library Journal (starred review) "As an expert and incredibly knowledgeable editor, Rhys Isaac guides us through the diaries of the great and deeply human Virginia patriarch, Landon Carter, ultimately the owner of over 700 black slaves, as he responds with both joy and furious anger to the coming of the American Revolution and to the seismic shocks it brought to Virginia's old regime and to his own authoritarian family."--David Brion Davis "A poignant tale of crumbling patriarchy in a world of revolutions....Unlike most historians, who try to maintain the appearance of objectivity, Isaac, like many anthropologists, feels that his personal perspective and subjective reactions should be made explicit....The result is a very personal and intimate portrait of a Virginia patriarch."--Gordon S. Wood, The New York Review of Books "An outstanding work of history....An extraordinary, fascinating set of firsthand accounts from the revolutionary era."-- Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "Full of rich cultural and psychological insights. Isaac sympathetically reveals Carter as a tragic figure, almost as cruel to himself as he was to others. Driven by a perverse but pervasive sense of duty, he alienated almost everyone in his angry wake."--Alan Taylor, New Republic "Offers fresh insights into the character of the plantocracy and its evolution. There is no doubt about the importance of Landon Carter's diary as a window on the planter class and Carter himself. It reveals a man who saw himself as a link in the long chain of patriarchy, whose history stretched back to time immemorial."--Ira Berlin, The Nation "If for nothing else, we should read Landon Carter because he was an honest man, and Rhys Isaac's Landon Carter's Uneasy Kingdom because it is a skilled and honest depiction of the man, his place, and his age."-- Christianity Today "Isaac convincingly portrays Carter, one of Virginia's twelve richest men, as a figure ensnared by contradictions: In his energetic defense of American liberty, Carter appreciated that he was helping to destroy a hierarchical world to which he was intensely attached....Isaac is a sensitive guide to Carter's world, and reading his "Offerstic exploration is the only way for the layman to comprehend the diaries properly."--Ben Schwarz, Atlantic Monthly "By creatively exploiting the remarkable diary of the eighteenth-century Virginia planter Landon Carter of Sabine Hall--a character out of a Fielding novel if t