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A short history of the American Revolutionary War
\"Ideologically defined by the colonists' formal Declaration of Independence in 1776, the struggle has taken on something of a mythic character. From the Boston Tea Party to Paul Revere's ride to raise the countryside of New England against the march of the Redcoats; and from the American travails of Bunker Hill (1775) to the final humiliation of the British at Yorktown (1781), the entire contest is now emblematic of American national identity. Stephen Conway shows that, beyond mythology, this was more than just a local conflict: rather a titanic struggle between France and Britain. The Thirteen Colonies were merely one frontline of an extended theatre of operations, with each superpower aiming to deliver the knockout blow. This bold new history recognizes the war as the Revolution but situates it on the wider, global canvas of European warfare.\"--Publisher's website.
BOOK
The Spirit of 1976
The most important national commemoration of the twentieth century, the 1976 bicentennial celebration gave rise to a broadranging debate over how the American Revolution should be remembered and represented. Federal planners seeking an uncritical glorification of the nation’s founding came up against an array of constituencies with other interests and objectives. Inspired by the “new social history” that looked at the past “from the bottom up,” Americans who had previously been disenfranchised by traditional national narratives—African Americans, women, American Indians, workers, young people—demanded a voice and representation in the planning. Local communities, similarly suspicious of federal direction, sought control over their own bicentennial events. Corporate representatives promoted an approach that championed the convergence of patriotism and private enterprise, while commercial interests applied the marketing techniques of an expanding consumerism to hawk every imaginable kind of patriotic souvenir to all of these groups. The end result of these competing efforts, Tammy S. Gordon shows, was a national celebration that reflected some common themes, including a mistrust of federal power, an embrace of decentralized authority, and a new cultural emphasis on the importance of the self. The American Revolution Bicentennial can thus be seen as both a product of the social and political changes of the 1960s and a harbinger of things to come. After 1976, the postwar myth of a consensus view of American history came to an end, ensuring that future national commemorations would continue to be contested.
eBook
Tea
In Tea ,
James R. Fichter reveals that despite the so-called Boston Tea
Party in 1773, two large shipments of tea from the East India
Company survived and were ultimately drunk in North
America. Their survival shaped the politics of the years
ahead, impeded efforts to reimburse the company for the tea lost in
Boston Harbor, and hinted at the enduring potency of consumerism in
revolutionary politics.
Tea protests were widespread in 1774, but so were tea
advertisements and tea sales, Fichter argues. The protests were
noisy and sometimes misleading performances, not clear signs that
tea consumption was unpopular. Revolutionaries vilified tea in
their propaganda and prohibited the importation and consumption of
tea and British goods. Yet merchant ledgers reveal these goods were
still widely sold and consumed in 1775. Colonists supported
Patriots more than they abided by non-consumption. When Congress
ended its prohibition against tea in 1776, it reasoned that the ban
was too widely violated to enforce. War was a more effective means
than boycott for resisting Parliament, after all, and as rebel arms
advanced, Patriots seized tea and other goods Britons left behind.
By 1776, protesters sought tea and, objecting to its high price,
redistributed rather than destroyed it. Yet as Fichter demonstrates
in Tea , by then the commodity was not a symbol of the
British state, but of American consumerism.
eBook
American Indians and African Americans of the American Revolution--through primary sources
\"Examines the lives and roles of African Americans and American Indians during the American Revolution, including the difficulty of choosing sides in the war and fighting for the Americans and the British\"--Provided by publisher.
Book
Empire States: The Coming of Dual Federalism
This Article offers an alternate account of federalism's late eighteenth-century origins. In place of scholarly and doctrinal accounts that portray federalism as a repudiation of models of unitary sovereignty, it emphasizes the federalist ideology of dual sovereignty as a form of centralization–a shift from a world of diffuse sovereignty to one where authority was increasingly imagined as concentrated in the hands of only two legitimate sovereigns. In making this claim, the Article focuses on two sequential late eighteenth-century transformations. The first concerned sovereignty. Pre-Revolutionary ideas about sovereignty reflected early modern corporatist understandings of authority as well as imperial realities of uneven jurisdiction. But the Revolution elevated a new understanding of sovereignty in which power derived from the consent of a uniform people. This conception empowered state legislatures, which, throughout the 1780s, sought to use their status under new state constitutions as the sole repositories of popular authority to subordinate competing claims to authority made by corporations, local institutions, Native nations, and separatist movements. The second shift came with the drafting and ratification of the U.S. Constitution, which bolstered federal authority partly in order to protect state authority against internal competitors–an aim reflected in the Guarantee and New State Clauses. Ultimately, the Constitution both limited and enhanced state authority; it entrenched a framework of dual sovereignty. After ratification, competitors to state sovereignty were increasingly constrained to appeal to some federal right or power. What had previously been contests among supposedly coequal sovereigns–what modern scholars would call horizontal federalism–became questions of vertical federalism, issues of whether federal authority would vindicate states or their opponents. Although the Article concludes with some implications of this history for present-day federalism doctrine and theory, its primary contribution is descriptive. Judges and lawyers routinely and almost unthinkingly invoke localism and power diffusion as the historical values of federalism. Yet the history explored here challenges whether these near-universal assumptions about federalism's aims actually reflect what federalism was designed to accomplish.
Journal Article
Books Received
The Long War over Party Structure: Democratic Representation and Policy Responsiveness in American Politics. To Begin the World Over Again: How the American Revolution Devastated the Globe. Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All.
Journal Article
THE ANGLO-AMERICAN CONFLICT IN THE FAR SIDE OF THE WORLD: A STRUGGLE FOR INFLUENCE OVER REVOLUTIONARY SOUTH AMERICA (1812-1814)
Research interpreting the collapse of the transatlantic empires as a global conflict fostered by inter-imperial rivalries - an age of 'imperial' revolutions - has contributed much in understanding the Atlantic' reconfiguration of two centuries ago. This reconfiguration is characterized by civil wars within the various empires, part of a general conflict between tradition and revolution, between supporters of the old empires and their opponents. Such interpretation fits both the Hispano-American independences and the concomitant Anglo-American War of 1812, the so-called Second War of Independence. This essay intends to show some points of contact between these two civil conflicts in the global war. It analyses the repercussions the War of 1812 had on conflicts between 'loyalists' and 'independentists' in South America, and formal and informal aspects of the struggle between Britain and the United States for influence over the area - how their 'imperial' nets expanded informally on land and sea through the use of agents as consuls, merchants and sailors, active largely between Río de la Plata and Chile. The American Pacific coast acquires a new centrality here, in the analysis of U.S. policy in Hispanic America and in the geography of the Atlantic reconfiguration, illuminating neglected details in the 'geopolitics of Latin-American independence'.
Journal Article