Gregg L. Frazer. God against the Revolution: The Loyalist Clergy’s Case against the American Revolution.

2020 ◽  
Vol 125 (1) ◽  
pp. 224-225
Author(s):  
Nancy L. Rhoden
Author(s):  
William E. Nelson

The conclusion makes two arguments. First, it takes the position common in the historical literature that the American Revolution was a comparatively placid one, with few killings of civilians, little property destruction, and no reign of terror. It argues that the placidity was a consequence of legal continuity—the same courts, judges, and juries that had governed the colonies in 1770 in large part continued to govern the new American states in 1780. During the course of the War of Independence itself, legal and constitutional change occurred almost entirely at the top, and, except in the few places occupied by the British military, life went on largely as it always had. The conclusion also argues that old ideas of unwritten constitutionalism persisted during and after the Revolution, but that a new idea that constitutions should be written to avoid ambiguity emerged beside the old ideas.


Author(s):  
J. C. D. Clark

Chapter 4 offers a new view of the American Revolution in terms more of negations than of affirmations: not the instantiation of modernizing natural rights theories or republicanism, but the result of older and passionate negations on both sides of the Atlantic, often religious. It reinterprets Paine’s Common Sense against the older contexts proposed in this book, and argues that the pamphlet, although important, was not transformative and ubiquitous. It traces Paine’s subsequent writings while in America, responding to and interpreting the course of the Revolution, and concludes that Paine’s understanding of that important episode was less than has been thought; rather, he largely remained within an English frame of reference, as did, indeed, most American colonists. He understood the American Revolution, then, in English terms.


2010 ◽  
Vol 25 (64) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mikkel Birk Jespersen

Mikkel Birk Jespersen: "Utopiens grænser i Den amerikanske revolution - Om utopiske tekststrategier i Common Sense og Letters from an American Farmer"AbstractMikkel Birk Jespersen: “Boundaries of Utopia in the American Revolution: On Utopian Text Strategies in Common Sense and Letters from an American Farmer”The article discusses the relations between utopia, literature and revolution in the American Revolution through an analysis of Tom Paine’s Common Sense (1776) and J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer (1782). It is arguedthat utopia constitutes a textual function whose ‘non-place’ or ‘point zero’ is not reducible to a political logic, but rather presents a challenge to it. In the revolution, however, the different logics of utopia and of the political can be said to confront each other, hereby illuminating the contradictions of both. The constellation of the two texts brings out the contradictory nature of utopia, as the texts have opposed approaches to the revolution and are characterised by two different utopian logics.


1966 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 190-212 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernard Mason

The ability of some New York businessmen to exploit the war economy of the Revolution is suggested in this study of their pursuits and profits.


1977 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-79
Author(s):  
Mike Ewart

Revolution — both the American Revolution and the general idea of revolutionary change — is an important theme in Cooper's work. Several novels are set in, and deal with, the Revolutionary period; others approach the Revolution by indirection, offering redefinitions of the period and its significance as it were by analogy (I am thinking of novels such as The Waterwitch and The Red Rover which, while they are not set in the Revolutionary period, offer their subjects as images and judgments of the Revolution); still other novels treat the problem of revolution in Europe. The conditions for, and likely results of, revolutionary change in Europe are also discussed in the non-fiction; the American Revolution is continually redefined; and in the incomplete New York the desirability and possibility of a new Revolution are considered.


Author(s):  
Mitch Kachun

Between 1771 and 1850 the Boston Massacre itself remained a part of the nation’s collective memory of the American Revolution. Some characterized it as a key event in forging colonial unity while others preferred to distance the Revolution from what they considered a disorderly riot. In either case, Attucks’s role and racial identity remained largely ignored, even among African Americans. A few scattered references to Attucks appeared during the first half of the nineteenth century, but he did not become a focal point for African American arguments for citizenship, inclusion, and equality until the 1850s, when African American activists recognized the central role Attucks might play in establishing blacks’ rightful place in the nation.


Author(s):  
Mitch Kachun

The 1976 bicentennial brought greater mainstream attention to Attucks and black participation in the Revolution as well as increasing opportunities to disseminate interpretations of Attucks and other African American heroes in schools and through ever-expanding mass media exposure over the subsequent decades. Attucks was becoming a standard figure in most popular American history textbooks and was featured even more visibly in mainstream culture outside the classroom. Of all the competing versions of Attucks circulating at that time, it was the taken-for-granted Revolutionary token that seemed most prominent in the nation’s collective memory; for many, he was a bland symbol of a romanticized American Revolution and an unthreatening black patriotism. By the end of the twentieth century, Attucks had, to a large degree, become a black American hero of the Revolution, though one who was still marginalized within the nation’s story.


1976 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 355-374 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. C. Bonwick

The eighteenth century was a great age of pamphleteering. Subjects were legion and authors innumerable. Every question of substance – and many of none – attracted writers to such a degree that in the world of politics one is tempted to establish the scale of pamphleteering as one of the yardsticks against which the importance of an issue should be measured. The American revolution fully conforms to this criterion, for during a twenty-year period beginning in 1763 it stimulated the publication of well over a thousand pamphlets in England alone. A good number of those pamphlets originated in America and their subsequent reappearance in England was a matter of considerable significance; some were written by Americans resident in London. This paper will examine the mechanics by which American revolutionary tracts were published and distributed in England, and their circulation among the radicals who proved themselves to be the patriots' best English friends during the difficult years of the revolution. They included among others Thomas Hollis, John Wilkes, Major John Cartwright and Granville Sharp; the Dissenting ministers Richard Price and Joseph Priestley, and one of the most brilliant women of her generation, Catharine Macaulay. Such an examination is not only an integral component in the analysis of the English side of the revolution; it also serves as a useful case-study in the mechanics and function of political propaganda.


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