As a writer of poetry, satiric plays, tragic dramas, letters to public and private figures, and a major history of the American Revolution, Mercy Otis Warren stood out among Americans of her time as virtually the only person of letters to work in all those genres. An exemplar for many modern historians of the "Republican Mother," she sought to explain the significance of the American Revolution and her own Stoic brand of republicanism to rising generations of young people. She believed with many of her time that women are primarily responsible for transmitting the values of culture to youth, but at the same time she affirmed through her work that women have a right to teach not only in the privacy of the domestic sphere but also in the arena of public discourse. With a life that spanned three wars and the deaths of three sons and a...