The Oxford Handbook of the American Revolution

by Gray, Edward G.; Kamensky, Jane

• ISBN13: 9780199746705
• ISBN10: 0199746702
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-12-06
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

The Oxford Handbook of the American Revolutiondraws on a wealth of new scholarship to create a vibrant dialogue among varied approaches to the revolution that made the United States. In thirty-three essays written by authorities on the period, theHandbook brings to life the diverse multitudes of colonial North America and their extraordinary struggles before, during, and after the eight-year-long civil war that secured the independence of thirteen rebel colonies from theirerstwhile colonial parent. The chapters explore battles and diplomacy, economics and finance, law and culture, politics and society, gender, race, and religion. Its diverse cast of characters includes ordinary farmers and artisans, free and enslaved African Americans, Indians, and British andAmerican statesmen and military leaders. In addition to expanding the Revolution's who, the Handbook broadens its where, portraying an event that far transcended the boundaries of what was to become the United States. It offers readers an American Revolution whose impact ranged far beyond the thirteen coloniesTheHandbook'srange of interpretive and methodological approaches captures the full scope of current revolutionary-era scholarship. Its authors, British and American scholars spanning several generations, include social, cultural, military, and imperial historians, as well as those who study politics, diplomacy, literature, gender, and sexuality. Together and separately, these essays demonstrate that the American Revolution remains a vibrant and inviting a subject of inquiry. Nothing comparable has been published in decades.

Author Biography

Edward G. Gray is professor of history at Florida State University. His previous books include The Making of John Ledyard: Empire and Ambition in the Life of an Early American Traveler and New World Babel: Languages and Nations in Early America.

Jane Kamensky is Harry S. Truman Professor of American History at Brandeis University. Her previous books include The Exchange Artist: A Tale of High-Flying Speculation and America's First Banking Collapse and Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech in Early New England.

Table of Contents

List of Maps

Contributors

Introduction: American Revolutions

Cultures and Crises

Britain's American Problem: The International Perspective

The Unsettled Periphery: The Backcountry on the Eve of the American Revolution

The Polite and the Plebian

Political Protest and the World of Goods

The Imperial Crisis

The Struggle Within: Colonial Politics on the Eve of Independence

The Democratic Moment: The Revolution and Popular Politics

Independence before and during the Revolution

War

The Continental Army

The British Army and the War of Independence

The War in the Cities

The War in the Countryside

Native Peoples in the Revolutionary War

The African Americans' Revolution

Women in the American Revolutionary War

Loyalism

The Revolutionary War and Europe's Great Powers

Funding the Revolution: Monetary and Fiscal Policy in Eighteenth-Century America

A Revolutionary Settlement

The Impact of the War on British Politics

The Trials of the Confederation

A More Perfect Union: The Framing and Ratification of the Constitution

The Evangelical Ascendancy in Revolutionary America

The Problems of Slavery

Rights

The Empire That Britain Kept

New Orders

The American Revolution and a New National Politics

Republican Art and Architecture

Print Culture after the Revolution

Republican Law

Discipline, Sex, and the Republican Self

The Laboring Republic

The Republic in the World, 1783-1803

America's Cultural Revolution in Transnational Perspective

Index

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.