Whose Revolution Was It?

by Young, Alfred F.; Nobles, Gregory H.

• ISBN13: 9780814797112
• ISBN10: 0814797113
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-09-01
• Publisher: New York Univ Pr

Summary

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.

Author Biography

Gregory H. Nobles is Professor of History at Georgia Institute of Technology. He has written extensively on rural society in the era of the American Revolution and Early Republic.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 1
American Historians Confront "The Transforming Hand of Revolution"	p. 13
Introduction	p. 13
J. Franklin Jameson	p. 16
The Jameson Thesis: The Text	p. 16
The Jameson Thesis: The Context	p. 19
Jameson's Achievement	p. 19
Progressives and Counter-Progressives	p. 33
The Progressive Historians	p. 33
The Counter-Progressives: Part 1	p. 47
Against the Grain
The Counter-Progressives: Part 2	p. 65
New Left, New Social History	p. 75
The New Left	p. 75
The New Social History	p. 89
Explorations: New Left, New Social, New Progressive	p. 96
Synthesis	p. 101
The Transformation of Early American History	p. 101
Toward a New Synthesis?	p. 114
Historians Extend the Reach of the American Revolution	p. 135
Introduction	p. 135
Refocusing on the Founders	p. 137
Twenty-first-Century "Founders Chic"	p. 137
The Elite Critique of Social History	p. 141
Redefining Freedom in the Revolution	p. 144
The Contradiction of Slavery	p. 144
The Revolution of the Enslaved	p. 146
Emancipation's Fate in the Revolutionary Era	p. 152
The Founders' Failures on Slavery	p. 156
Facing the Revolution from Indian Country	p. 172
Native American Perspectives on Euro-American Struggles	p. 172
Eighteenth-Century American Empires	p. 181
Reconsidering Class in the American Revolution	p. 192
The Roots and Resurgence of Class Analysis	p. 192
The Urban Context of Class	p. 196
Class in the Countryside	p. 208
Writing Women into the Revolution	p. 224
Energy and Innovation since 1980	p. 224
New Approaches to Elite Women's Lives	p. 230
The Historical Recovery of Ordinary Women's Lives	p. 235
Women in the Post-Revolutionary Public Sphere	p. 246
Afterword	p. 257
Acknowledgments	p. 265
Index	p. 267
About the Authors	p. 287
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.