Oxford University Press, 564 pp., $35.00
What was the American Revolution? The people who joined to carry it out had different views of what they had done. In 1787 Benjamin Rush, a Philadelphia physician and ardent patriot, reflected that "the war is over, but this is far from being the case with the American Revolution. On the contrary, nothing but the first act of the great drama is closed." In 1818 Rush's Massachusetts friend John Adams had another view. "What do we mean by the American Revolution?" he asked. "Do we mean the American war?" And he answered himself, "The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people." Historians have extended the time span in both directions to give the Revolution different meanings. Gordon Wood in The Radicalism of the American Revolution carried it forward to include the advent of Jacksonian democracy in the 1830s. Jon Butler carried it backward as far as 1680, in Becoming America: The Revolution Before 1776.
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