Category: American Revolution

Pauline Maier’s “From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765-1776” (1972) is one of the most thoughtful and enduring contributions to the historiography of the American Revolution. The book represented a significant shift in how scholars approached the study of colonial radicalism, eschewing romanticized portrayals of the founding…

Most people don’t think of the Carolinas as a major theater of operations during the American Revolution. Yet, the British looked at the South as a critical part of their strategy to isolate and destroy seditious New England, which the North administration believed was the atypical nest of rebellion. John Buchanan’s “The Road to Guilford…

“A People Numerous & Armed” is a collection of twelve essays written by John Shy in the late 1960s and 1970s when he was an up-and-coming historian at the University of Michigan. In his own estimation, the themes that unite the varied pieces are “that war changes society, that strategy and military policy are aspects…

work in a corporate environment, mainly alongside MBAs, and The War for America by Piers Mackesy is one of the rare substantive history books I would enthusiastically recommend as professional reading to my colleagues. It offers a compelling study of leadership, strategy, and organizational dynamics—lessons as relevant to boardrooms as they are to battlefields. Mackesy’s…

There aren’t many historians like David Hackett Fischer, widely respected by his judgmental, often captious peers in the academy, the recipient of some of the most prestigious awards in his field, and capable of taking serious scholarship mainstream and with commercial success. I was first introduced to Fisher in graduate school when we were required…

First published over a half century ago, the Morgans’ “The Stamp Act Crisis” is still the most well-rounded and penetrating account of the political upheaval of 1764 to 1766 that essentially put the American Revolution in motion. The authors combine the very best of narrative history, with a strong focus on some of the most…

Charles Andrews, writing in the early 1920s, thought that contemporary understanding and appreciation of the American Revolution was clouded by popular propaganda and national tendency for ancestor worship. This monograph, “The Colonial Background of the American Revolution,” seeks to reverse the general habit of trying to justify rather than explain, and the tendency by early…

Doctoral dissertations rarely make interesting reading. Fewer still win the Parkman Prize. “A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and American Character, 1775-1783,” based largely on Charles Royster’s University of California PhD dissertation, is a notable exception. Royster argues that a number of issues motivated the American soldiers who fought the Revolution, but above…

Few people remember the name Thomas Hutchinson today, but he was once the most hated man in America. And, if Bernard Bailyn, one of the most distinguished historians of revolutionary America, is to be believed, he is also one of the most misunderstood and wrongfully maligned men in American history. Several notable pieces seek to…