Reassessing Bernard Bailyn's The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution on the Occasion of its Jubilee

2018 ◽  
Vol 91 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-109
Author(s):  
Gordon S. Wood
Keyword(s):  
American Revolution ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Revolution

This essay places Bernard Bailyn's The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution in its historiographical context, addresses its implications for the Constitutional settlement, and places it within current scholarly debates on the Revolution. In the last, it argues, the Ideological Origins offers a contrasting vision of history and the historian to the recent focus on issues of race, class, and gender and demand that history meet contemporary needs.

Revolution in Boston? Eight Propositions for Public History on the Freedom Trail

2003 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 17-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alfred F. Young
Keyword(s):  
American Revolution ◽  
Public History ◽  
Dark Side ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
The Public ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Freedom Trail ◽  
The Many ◽  
Collaborative Efforts ◽  
The Revolution

The author reassesses the public presentation of history on Boston's Freedom Trail, founded in the 1950s, in light of the reinterpretation of the American Revolution which has brought into focus the multi-sided struggle for liberty and equality within America. In eight propositions, he questions whether the many sites of the trail with a minimum of coordination, do justice to the "popular" side of the Revolution. Boston is at risk in dealing with race and gender, he suggests, of fragmenting the Revolution. In avoiding the "dark" side, it can fall into an exclusively celebratory history. To present a more coherent history, the author points to the need for greater collaborative efforts by the sites which make up the trail.

Conclusion: Legal and Constitutional Legacies

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
William E. Nelson
Keyword(s):  
American Revolution ◽  
Constitutional Change ◽  
War Of Independence ◽  
Military Life ◽  
American States ◽  
Historical Literature ◽  
British Military ◽  
Reign Of Terror ◽  
Property Destruction ◽  
The Revolution

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.

The Unexpected Revolution

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. C. D. Clark
Keyword(s):  
American Revolution ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Frame Of Reference ◽  
Rights Theories ◽  
New View ◽  
The Revolution

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.

scholarly journals Women and Gender in 1917

Slavic Review ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 76 (3) ◽  
pp. 694-702 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rochelle Goldberg Ruthchild
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Significant Issue ◽  
Women And Gender ◽  
One Dimensional ◽  
History Of ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Almost All ◽  
The Revolution

This paper argues for greater integration of considerations of women and gender in the history of the 1917 Russian Revolutions. Two key issues have long been discussed by historians: the spontaneity/consciousness paradigm, and the role of class in the revolution. Neither has been adequately analyzed in relation to gender. Women's suffrage has been largely neglected despite the fact that it was a significant issue throughout the year and represented a pioneering advance won by a countrywide coalition of women and men from the working class and intelligentsia, and from almost all political parties. In this centennial year, accounts of the Revolution remain one-dimensional; women remain the other.

scholarly journals Utopiens grænser i Den amerikanske revolution

2010 ◽  
Vol 25 (64) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mikkel Birk Jespersen
Keyword(s):  
American Revolution ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
The Political ◽  
American Farmer ◽  
Political Logic ◽  
The Revolution

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.

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 205-210
Author(s):  
Simon Wendt
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
First Century ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
American Women ◽  
American Conservatism ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
To Come ◽  
And Gender

The conclusion provides a brief discussion of the DAR’s significance vis-à-vis the historiography of American conservatism and gender. While it remains to be seen how recent developments will affect the DAR’s commemorative, educational, and patriotic activism in the years to come, its history reminds us that the Daughters played a vital role in shaping and disseminating conservative notions of nationalism that continue to reverberate in the new millennium. This chapter examines the organization’s activities in the twenty-first century; in particular, it tries to explain why so many American women, including numerous African Americans, continue to join the organization and what it means to be a Daughter of the American Revolution during the era of Donald Trump.

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