Whose American Revolution Was It?

Historians Interpret the Founding

Alfred F. Young, Gregory Nobles

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780814797433
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

The meaning of the American Revolution has always been a much-contested question, and asking it is particularly important today: the standard, easily digested narrative puts the Founding Fathers at the head of a unified movement, failing to acknowledge the deep divisions in Revolutionary-era society and the many different historical interpretations that have followed. Whose American Revolution Was It? speaks both to the ways diverse groups of Americans who lived through the Revolution might have answered that question and to the different ways historians through the decades have interpreted the Revolution for our own time. As the only volume to offer an accessible and sweeping discussion of the period’s historiography and its historians, Whose American Revolution Was It? is an essential reference for anyone studying early American history. The first section, by Alfred F. Young, begins in 1925 with historian J. Franklin Jameson and takes the reader through the successive schools of interpretation up to the 1990s. The second section, by Gregory H. Nobles, focuses primarily on the ways present-day historians have expanded our understanding of the broader social history of the Revolution, bringing onto the stage farmers and artisans, who made up the majority of white men, as well as African Americans, Native Americans, and women of all social classes.

Index

abolitionism, 166–168, 170

Adams, Abigail, 7, 139, 231–234, 236

Adams, Henry, 101

Adams, Herbert Baxter, 24

Adams, James Truslow, 55

Adams, John: Adams and, Abigail, 7;

Ellis and, Joseph, 138;

Ferling and, John, 138;

on Jefferson, 13;

marriage, 139;

Massachusetts Historical Society, 5;

McCullough’s biography, David, 138–140, 142;

as a model of moral propriety, 139;

on the Revolution, 62;

slavery, 168;

Warren and, Mercy Otis, 233

Adams, Samuel, 67, 78, 200

Affluent Society (Galbraith), 51

African Americans in the Revolutionary era, 144–152;

in colonial society, 89;

Dunmore and, John Murrary, 4th Earl of, 150–151;

elites in the Revolutionary era and, 100;

evacuees accompanying British forces, 150;

fighters on patriot side, 144–145, 148–149, 164–165, 259;

free blacks, 98, 99, 114, 144, 148–149, 165;

in histories of the Revolution, 8;

interactions with Native Americans and Euro-Americans, 91;

Jameson on, J. Franklin, 23;

as “losers” in the Revolutionary era, 101, 108;

Nash on, Gary B., 118, 121–122, 152, 261;

new social history, 89;

Progressive historians, 9;

public sphere, exclusion from, 253, 255;

Quarles’ Negro in the American Revolution, 61;

Revolutionary-era leaders, 259;

in syntheses of histories of the Revolution, 112–113;

women’s lives, 230. See also slavery

“After Carl Becker” (Lynd), 80–81

Age of Homespun (Ulrich), 237

agrarian history, 111–112, 208–210

Agrarian Origins of American Capitalism (Kulikoff), 208–210

agrarian protests, 111–112, 215–216, 218–219

Allan, Thomas, 130

Allen, Ethan, 39

Allgor, Catherine, 250

American Civilization series, 54

American Council of Learned Societies, 21–22

American Historical Association (AHA), 4, 21, 22, 26, 29

American Historical Review (journal): African American authors, 23;

Jameson and, J. Franklin, 21, 23, 27, 28;

Lemisch and, Jesse, 86–87

American Leviathan (Griffin), 183

American Revolution (Countryman), 260–262

American Revolution: Explor...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• American Historians Confront “The Transforming Hand of Revolution”
• Historians Extend the Reach of the American Revolution
• Afterword
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• About the Authors
• Footnotes