Detailed Study of the American Revolution
Detailed Study of the American Revolution
Introduction: Methodological Issues and Opportunities
If, as is often said, history is the study of change over time, then the American Revolution is an ideal case study for historical understanding. The Revolution presents a wide range of issues having to do with the nature, causation, mechanisms, and extent of historical change. For example:
Was the Revolution really a revolution? Or was it that historical oxymoron, a conservative revolution? What does the term "revolution" mean? And can we apply it to such diverse historical episodes as the American Revolution and the French Revolution?
Are the arguments of those supporting or opposing the Revolution (and, a decade later, supporting or opposing the Constitution) accurate explanations of and justifications for why these men and women acted as they did, or are they rationalizations (conscious or unconscious) crafted after the fact?
What place does intellectual context -- the structure of ideas and intellectual assumptions shared or debated by people in a given period -- have in history? How do we set a historical process such as the Revolution into its intellectual context?
Who are the proper subjects of history -- the articulate, power-wielding minority or the inarticulate majority? The victors (those supporting the Revolution) or the losers (the British and the Loyalists)? And does it make sense to choose at all?
Can we really know the "truth" of what happened in a major historical event or process such as the Revolution? (John Adams thought not -- and he was there.)
These issues are not just methodological preoccupations for modern educators. The Revolutionary generation understood questions of this sort very well, confronting them as the Revolution unfolded and, decades later, in pondering the Revolution's legacy. For example, the elderly John Adams kept up a lively correspondence on the question that forms the heart of this essay: What was the American Revolution? The question that perplexed and obsessed Adams still fascinates us, two centuries later, as he believed and expected it would.
To help our students understand it, we must think of the men and women of the Revolutionary generation as more than decorous refugees from a historical costume-party. Further, we and our students must think of the problems the Revolutionary generation c confronted in the ways that they did -- as terribly perplexing yet endlessly fascinating, time-bound yet timeless quandaries whose solutions were neither obvious nor fore-ordained.
I. Argument and Drama, 1760-1775
The Revolution began as an argument...