In a stark dichotomy advanced during the Cold War, the American Revolution was the good, orderly, restrained, and successful revolution – defined in contrast to the French, Russian, or Chinese revolutions.īy the especially destructive standards of other revolutions, the American was relatively restrained, but polarities mislead by insisting on perfect opposites. During their revolution, Americans experienced more turmoil, bloodshed, and destruction than any other generation of their nation until the Civil War of 1861-1865. During the revolutionary war, Americans killed one another over politics and massacred their Indian neighbors, who returned the bloody favors. Patriots also kept two-fifths of Americans in slavery, rather than permit their escape to help the British. Some of the enslaved did embrace revolutionary rhetoric to seek freedom and equality as Americans, but many more suffered greater and prolonged exploitation. The economic decline wrought by the revolution lasted for fifteen years and was unmatched until the Great Depression of the 1930s. If the American Revolution was less devastating than other upheavals elsewhere, this does not define it as the absence of cruelty, violence, and destruction. The inclusion of the enslaved and Native peoples also highlights the divisive nature of the revolution, which breaks with the tradition of casting the American Revolution as the polar opposite of other, bloodier revolutions elsewhere. American Revolutions attempts to balance attention to the larger context while covering the major story on that bigger stage in the period 1750-1800: the creation of the United States and the acceleration of its growth. That approach demotes neighboring empires and native peoples to bit players and minor obstacles to inevitable American expansion. Canada, Spanish America, and the West Indies appear prominently in recent histories of colonial America, but they virtually vanish when historians turn to the subsequent revolution and early republic. Most previous books on the revolution, especially popular histories, focus obsessively on the national story of the United States, on the development of its republican institutions at the national level. Norton, 2016) includes the entire North American Continent, breaking with the traditional and almost exclusive focus on the Thirteen Colonies of the Atlantic Seaboard. His recent book on the American Revolution, entitled American Revolutions (W.W. Alan Taylor is Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor of History at the University of Virginia, and this year’s Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at the Rothermere American Institute.
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