Whose American Revolution Was It?: Historians Interpret the Founding
Alfred F. Young
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.
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About Alfred F. Young
Reviews for Whose American Revolution Was It?: Historians Interpret the Founding
Gary Nash,author of The Unknown American Revolution "Young and Nobles characterizations of their often quirky protagonists are so vivid and so witty that to me, Whose American Revolution Was It? felt less like reading a book than like watching a play."
Woody Holton,author of Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution "A masterful synthesis of almost 100 years of scholarship on the American Revolution. Scholars, students, and non-specialists will find this work to be an invaluable guide to understanding the revolutionary period of American history."
Rosemarie Zagarri,George Mason University "There is no better guide to the recent debates about the social history of the Revolution. Young and Nobles make it clear what is at stake in how we characterize the Revolution's nature and impact. A must-read for all students of the Revolutionary era."
David Waldstreicher "Young and Nobles bring together all the richness that historians have found about the real, dramatic, transforming, liberating, and sometimes tragic American Revolutionary era.Everybody who is seriously interested in how the United States began should read this book."
Edward Countryman,author of The American Revolution and Americans, A Collision of Histories