American Bloods: The Untamed Dynasty That Shaped a Nation

Following the discovery of a “convoluted” genealogical document in a secret room in the author’s newly purchased Massachusetts colonial farmhouse, this enthralling narrative from philosopher Kaag (Hiking with Nietzsche) unearths the story of one of America’s oldest families, the Bloods. He examines how across three centuries the Bloods “explored, and laid claim to, the frontiers—geographic, political, intellectual and spiritual—that became the very core of a nation.” Beginning with Englishman Thomas Blood and his thwarted 1671 attempt to steal the British crown jewels, Kaag’s cast includes three brothers who settled in colonial New England; a Revolutionary War minuteman, Thaddeus, who inspired Ralph Waldo Emerson; Thaddeus’s hermit son, Perez, who “fashioned an observatory” in the woods that captivated neighbor Henry David Thoreau; and Aretas, an early railroad industrialist. By the 1850s, many of the Bloods began to move West, including James Clinton Blood, an antislavery cofounder of Lawrence, Kans., who had encounters with abolitionist John Brown; Union Army officer James Harvey Blood, the common law husband of suffragette and spiritualist Victoria Woodhull; and mystic Benjamin Blood, who influenced philosopher William James. Kaag’s sweeping portrayal of the Bloods as continuous participants in the country’s intellectual and spiritual development reveals how central the idea of the frontier and its “wildness” was to the nation’s elite. It’s a unique ideological history of America. (May)