The American Revolution is all around us. It is pictured as big as billboards and as small as postage stamps, evoked in political campaigns and car advertising campaigns, relived in museums and ...revised in computer games. As the nation's founding moment, the American Revolution serves as a source of powerful founding myths, and remains the most accessible and most contested event in U.S. history: more than any other, it stands as a proxy for how Americans perceive the nation's aspirations. Americans' increased fascination with the Revolution over the past two decades represents more than interest in the past. It's also a site to work out the present, and the future. What are we using the Revolution to debate?
InFighting over the Founders, Andrew M. Schocket explores how politicians, screenwriters, activists, biographers, jurists, museum professionals, and reenactors portray the American Revolution. Identifying competing "essentialist" and "organicist" interpretations of the American Revolution, Schocket shows how today's memories of the American Revolution reveal American's conflicted ideas about class, about race, and about gender-as well as the nature of history itself.Fighting over the Foundersplumbs our views of the past and the present, and illuminates our ideas of what United States means to its citizens in the new millennium.
Finalist, 2014 AEJMC Tankard Book Award
Carol Sue Humphrey'sThe American Revolution and the Pressargues that newspapers played an important role during America's struggle for independence by keeping ...Americans engaged in the war even when the fighting occurred in distant locales. From the moment that the colonials received word of Britain's new taxes in 1764 until reports of the peace treaty arrived in 1783, the press constituted the major source of information about events and developments in the conflict with the mother country. Both Benjamin Franklin, one of the Revolution's greatest leaders, and Ambrose Serle, a Loyalist, described the press as an "engine" that should be used to advance the cause. The efforts of Patriot printers to keep readers informed about the war helped ensure ultimate success by boosting morale and rallying Americans to the cause until victory was achieved. As Humphrey illustrates, Revolutionary-era newspapers provided the political and ideological unity that helped Americans secure their independence and create a new nation.
The founding fathers were rebels against the British Parliament, Eric Nelson argues, not the Crown. As a result of their labors, the 1787 Constitution assigned its new president far more power than ...any British monarch had wielded for 100 years. On one side of the Atlantic were kings without monarchy; on the other, monarchy without kings.
