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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 over the meaning of the unwritten British constitution as applied to British North America. Rooted in the aftermath of the Seven Years' War between Britain and France, this dispute pitted colonial politicians and legal thinkers against British authorities and their apologists. The issue began as a pragmatic matter of costs: who should bear the massive burden of debt incurred by Great Britain in fighting and winning the war? To the British, it seemed self-evident: because the war, the last of a series of wars of empire, was fought largely to preserve British colonial possessions, the colonies should contribute their fair share to relieving wartime debt. But, for several reasons, it was not so simple in the eyes of the American colonists. First, then as now, people hated new taxes.
Second, the Americans disputed the authority of the British Parliament to tax them, enact laws for them, or do anything else to them. The Americans maintained that they were not represented in Parliament; therefore, Parliament could not act to bind free Englishmen residing in the American colonies. Only legislatures elected by the colonists and responsible to them could make laws for them and impose taxes on them. The British regarded these claims as quaint at best, and dishonest at worst.
They maintained that, because Parliament was required to legislate for the benefit of all English subjects wherever they might reside, the Americans were "virtually" represented d in Parliament even though they could not elect members to the House of Commons. Because Parliament had supreme power to make laws for the Empire, the colonists could not challenge its authority. The colonists answered that, if Parliament acted without a check on its power, it was just as arbitrary and thus dangerous to liberty as the Stuart kings Charles I and James II had been. This was the shape of the argument that began in 1765, with the Stamp Act and the colonists's tamp Act Congress, and continued for ten years, through the Battles of Lexington and Concord and the convening of the Second Continental Congress. The colonists carried out the argument with the British government at two levels -- formal and informal. The formal level consisted of the declarations, resolutions, and petitions produced by town meetings, colonial legislatures, and intercolonial congresses.
The informal level, just as important as the formal level, was a politics of ritual and demonstrations carried out by colonial radicals (for example, burning effigies, "riots" [which, as Americans conducted them, were actually peaceful demonstrations with only limited and ritualized violence], and the Boston Tea Party). In this period, nobody thought of or admitted thinking of Independence (capitalized to denote a political concept). The years of argument and drama, however, inculcated among the American colonists the idea that they had much in common -- that they ought to see themselves as one people with a common identity and a set of common interests overshadowing specific concerns. The arguments and rituals of revolution also set in motion the practice of building a national political framework and a national political community. II.
War and Independence, 1775 - 1783 In the spring of 1775, the argument became a military conflict; within a year, it transformed itself into a war for American independence (lower-cased to denote a legal reality) and national identity. The intermittent gatherings of representatives from the colonies to protest British policy had become a Continental Congress, which took up the task of forging a national politics, a national ideology (articulated by Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine), a national diplomacy (pioneered by Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and John Jay), and a national military (led by George Washington). All these were vital elements of creating an independent nation. We see these elements coming together in the first great expression of the American mind -- the Declaration of Independence, drafted by Thomas Jefferson and revised and adopted on 4 July 1776 by the Second Continental Congress. The Declaration divides into two parts: the preamble, looking forward, stated the basic terms of American national identity and politics, whereas the body, looking backward, was the last word of the Americans in the long and frustrating constitutional controversy with the mother country. This struggle for independence and liberty was a long and painful one, with no guarantees and no fore-ordained result.
The war was a long, frustrating, and brutal struggle -- the longest war this nation ever fought until the Vietnam Conflict of 1963 - 1975. Many historians agree that Americans were forced in the early years of...
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Research essay sample on Detailed Study Of The American Revolution
