America's Revolution

by Griffin, Patrick

• ISBN13: 9780199754809
• ISBN10: 0199754802
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2012-08-17
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

InAmerica's Revolution, Patrick Griffin offers a new interpretation, narrative, and historical synthesis of America's most formative period. Exploring the American Revolution from global, Atlantic, and continental perspectives, Griffin focuses on how men and women in local contexts struggled to imagine new ideas of sovereignty as British authority collapsed. He examines the relationship between ideas and social tensions, the War of Independence, the roles of the founders, and the struggles and triumphs of those on the margins. Griffin illustrates how, between 1763 and 1800, Americans moved from one mythic conception of who they were to a very different one, a change that was evident in word and in image.America's Revolutioncaptures these dynamics by exploring origins and outcomes--as well as the violent, uncertain, and liberating process of revolution--that bridged the two.

Author Biography

Patrick Griffin is Madden-Hennebry Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of American Leviathan: Empire, Nation, and Revolutionary Frontier (2008) and The People with No Name: Ireland's Ulster Scots, America's Scots Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World (2001).

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgements

Part I: The Beginning: Britons

Chapter 1: "O Happy Country! Happy Kingdom!"
Chapter 2: "Reduce the Savages to Reason"
Chapter 3: "Such a Power should be watched with a jealous Eye"

Part II: The Middle: Actors

Chapter 4: "They will cast your sovereignty in your face"
Chapter 5: "The Devil is in the People"
Chapter 6: "Dark and bloody grounds"

Part III: The End: Founders

Chapter 7: "In the chair of independency"
Chapter 8: "Some way or other we must be a great and mighty empire"
Chapter 9: "Puzzled and prospering beyond example in the history of man"

Notes
Index