the ideological origins of the american revolution bailyn bernard 1992

As Wood himself puts it in his introduction to the new work, “there is a time for understanding the particular, and there is a time for understanding the whole.” True to the author’s intent, The Radicalism of the American Revolution not only makes us comprehend more fully a (perhaps the) major event in America’s past but as well appreciate how that event and its aftermath have continued to influence American history. Now we have it, and, given the promise of the shorter work, we should not be surprised that it was worth waiting for. In the years since its publication Wood has crafted a number of elegant and similarly powerful essays, but everyone had been waiting for the “big” book. Wood is no stranger to such achievement, for his first book, the prize-winning Creation of the American Republic (1967), itself is in this vein and remains one of the most influential works in early American history. Wood’s The Radicalism of the American Revolution. Greene’s Pursuits of Happiness (1988), Charles Seller’s The Market Revolution (1991), and Bailyn’s own Voyagers to the West (1986), in which, among other accomplishments, these eminent historians synthesize great amounts of the specialized work that has accumulated since the emergence of the “new social history” in the late 1960’s. The profession finally may be turning a corner, however, for in the wake of Bernard Bailyn’s call, in the mid-1980’s, for more broadly conceived scholarship, we recently have seen such books as Jack P. Given the predominantly specialized and intensive nature of most work in American history over the past two decades, one yearns for studies with a longer or broader sweep. The Radicalism of the American Revolution.

The ideological origins of the american revolution bailyn bernard 1992