scholarly journals Marines in the Revolution: A History of the Continental Marines in the American Revolution, 1775-1783

1976 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
pp. 398
Author(s):  
Howard H. Peckham ◽  
Charles R. Smith
1989 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 361-388 ◽  
Author(s):  
James E. Bradley

“And now the new system of government came into being. For the first time since the accession of the House of Hanover, the Tory party was in the ascendant.” So wrote Lord Macaulay concerning the early years of George III's reign. In Macaulay's essay on the earl of Chatham one can find all the elements of the Whig myth of the reign of George III. Most of these ideas have been safely laid to rest by Sir Lewis Namier and modern research; we now know that there was neither a new system of government at the accession of the king nor anything resembling a Tory party. George III was not the tyrant depicted in the Declaration of Independence, there was no plot in the imagined cabinet of “king's friends” to overthrow the constitution, and when, with respect to the colonies, the king declared that he would abide by the decision of his Parliament, he was taking a stand on the side of Whig principles and the Revolution Settlement.One element in the putative resurgence of Toryism that Macaulay and other Whig historians emphasized was High-Anglican political theology. G. H. Guttridge, for example, in his English Whiggism and the American Revolution (1942) well understood the differences between the Toryism of the period of the American Revolution and that of the earlier century. Tories had come to accept the Revolution Settlement, the Hanoverian succession, and even “a modicum of religious toleration.” But if they had lost the bloom of monarchical sentiment, they retained the concept of a state unified above sectional and party interests. Guttridge's formulas were admittedly too simplistic and they justly invited criticism, but one of the overlooked merits of his work was that he located the continuity of conservative thought in its religious aspect. He observed that, “Standing for the two great Tory principles, national unity and a religious sanction for the established order, the Church of England was the central institution of Toryism—the state in its religious aspect, and the divine principle in monarchical government.” The demolition of the Whig interpretation, however, has resulted in a thorough-going neglect of political discourse, and several notable examples of this deconstruction bear directly upon Anglican political thought. In his introduction to the History of Parliament John Brooke wrote that during the American Revolution the Anglican clergy in England had no specific attitude toward the war or any other aspect of government policy. When the reprint of G. H. Guttridge's essay appeared in 1963, Ian Christie wrote a vigorous rebuttal to the idea of a revival of Toryism in the early part of George III's reign without a single reference to the Anglican Church.


1947 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-64 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Vernadsky

The two great revolutions of the eighteenth century—the American and the French had each in turn and in its own way a profound influence not only on the history of the United States and of France, but directly or indirectly on the history of the whole world.These two powerful currents had a common source in the French ideological movement before the Revolution. The development of American revolutionary thought was of course more closely linked to the English ideology, but there was much contact and cross influence between the English and the French philosophers. Further, the French political and philosophical literature was directly accessible to Americans without intermediary English works. We have only to mention Montesquieu and his principle of the separation of powers which serves as the basis of the Constitution of the United States. Also, the American Revolution influenced in turn political developments in France. One finds the roots of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen not only in France but in America as well.


2012 ◽  
Vol 81 (2) ◽  
pp. 348-377 ◽  
Author(s):  
Young Hwi Yoon

In the history of the Atlantic antislavery movement, two events were of great importance: the Great Awakening and the American Revolution. In the 1730s and 1740s, many evangelicals stimulated by the religious revival, travelled to the opposite side of the Atlantic, preached the gospel, and published a number of books that contained their evangelical faith and ideals. Through these activities many evangelicals in Anglo-American communities shared common interests, faith, and ideology, and some found a channel of transatlantic communication in which they were able to debate the slavery issue. The American Revolution also contributed to creating an atmosphere of tension in the 1770s, in which antislavery sentiment became transformed into moral conviction. The development of this ideology can be explained by the spread of antipathy toward slavery in the Atlantic world before the Revolution. This essay focuses on the change in the evangelical mindset between these two religio-political events, asking: how did the antislavery sentiment spread through the transatlantic evangelical network from the 1740s into the 1770s?


1899 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 117-136
Author(s):  
Frank H. Hill

The classic view of the struggle between George III. and the Whig aristocracy, which had its climax and catastrophe in the years 1783–4, is given with great force in Sir George Trevelyan's ‘History of the American Revolution.’ ‘By the time,’ he writes, ‘George III. had been on the throne ten years, there were no two opinions about the righteousness and wisdom of the Revolution of 1688. To hear them talk they were all Whigs together, but meanwhile, under their eyes and with their concurrence, a despotism of subtle and insidious texture was being swiftly and deftly interwoven into the entire fabric of the constitution. The strong will, the imperious character and the patient unresting industry of the King, working through subservient Ministers on a corrupt Parliament, had made him master of the State as effectively and far more securely than if his authority had rested on the support of an army of foreign mercenaries.’


1979 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-56
Author(s):  
Lawrence J. Friedman ◽  
Arthur H. Shaffer

In 1785 physician-politician David Ramsay of Charleston published The History of the Revolution of South Carolina. Contemporaries praised it highly. Four years later Ramsay produced a more ambitious work, The History of the American Revolution. It established his reputation both in America and abroad as the new nation's leading historian. Thus in a few short years Ramsay went from a locally prominent physician and State legislator to an important national cultural and literary figure. The American reading public found his approach to history to its tastes. He expressed a set of ideas about American history in general and the Revolution in particular that were common currency in the United States. But he expressed them for the first time in well-reasoned and documented historical narrative: in volumes that were suitably pro-American, yet judicious in their treatment of Britain, that made a strong case for American uniqueness while maintaining the ideal of the United States as a model for the world.Ramsay's histories alone would attract our interest as the first and most influential historical analysis of the American Revolution and the ratification of the Federal Constitution. But Ramsay's writings and his career as physician and politician are also significant because they launch us upon a journey into the mind of one of the new nation's most articulate spokesmen on historical, political, and medical issues. There is, to be sure, little in the general pattern of his life to distinguish him from a number of his contemporaries among the professions and political figures of second rank. Ramsay seldom formulated original ideas. His importance was not simply, or even primarily, that of a political or historical philosopher or medical innovator.


Author(s):  
A. James McAdams

This book is a sweeping history of one of the most significant political institutions of the modern world. The communist party was a revolutionary idea long before its supporters came to power. The book argues that the rise and fall of communism can be understood only by taking into account the origins and evolution of this compelling idea. It shows how the leaders of parties in countries as diverse as the Soviet Union, China, Germany, Yugoslavia, Cuba, and North Korea adapted the original ideas of revolutionaries like Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin to profoundly different social and cultural settings. The book is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand world communism and the captivating idea that gave it life.


2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 278-291
Author(s):  
Egor A. Yesyunin

The article is devoted to the satirical agitation ABCs that appeared during the Civil War, which have never previously been identified by researchers as a separate type of agitation art. The ABCs, which used to have the narrow purpose of teaching children to read and write before, became a form of agitation art in the hands of artists and writers. This was facilitated by the fact that ABCs, in contrast to primers, are less loaded with educational material and, accordingly, they have more space for illustrations. The article presents the development history of the agitation ABCs, focusing in detail on four of them: V.V. Mayakovsky’s “Soviet ABC”, D.S. Moor’s “Red Army Soldier’s ABC”, A.I. Strakhov’s “ABC of the Revolution”, and M.M. Cheremnykh’s “Anti-Religious ABC”. There is also briefly considered “Our ABC”: the “TASS Posters” created by various artists during the Second World War. The article highlights the special significance of V.V. Mayakovsky’s first agitation ABC, which later became a reference point for many artists. The authors of the first satirical ABCs of the Civil War period consciously used the traditional form of popular prints, as well as ditties and sayings, in order to create images close to the people. The article focuses on the iconographic connections between the ABCs and posters in the works of D.S. Moor and M.M. Cheremnykh, who transferred their solutions from the posters to the ABCs.


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):  
Ruth Scurr

Thomas Carlyle claimed that his history of the French Revolution was ‘a wild savage book, itself a kind of French Revolution …’. This chapter considers his stylistic approaches to creating the illusion of immediacy: his presentation of seemingly unmediated fact through the transformation of memoir and other kinds of historical record into a compelling dramatic narrative. Closely examining the ways in which he worked biographical anecdote into the fabric of his text raises questions about Carlyle’s wider historical purposes. Pressing the question of what it means to think through style, or to distinguish expressive emotive writing from abstract understanding, is an opportunity to reconsider Carlyle’s relation to his predecessors and contemporaries writing on the Revolution in English.


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