The American Revolution Reborn

Patrick Spero and Michael Zuckerman

Narrated by Mark Caldwell Walker

Available from Audible

Book published by University of Pennsylvania Press

When Americans in the nineteenth century remembered the Revolutionary War, as Daniel Webster did at the Bunker Hill dedication in 1825, they painted images with their words of defiant patriots facing off with British redcoats. They told of valiant soldiers fighting for the cause of democracy and of a populace rallying around them and the cause for which they fought. "The principle of free government adheres to the American soil," Webster declared in the same speech. "It is bedded in it, immovable as its mountains." Such a rendering of the Revolution was intended to instill democratic ideals and nationalistic feeling in a generation born after the war. As Webster noted with no small a hint of concern, "Those who established our liberty and our government are daily dropping from among us. The great trust now descends to new hands." The idealism imbedded in Webster's speech represents the very first popular interpretation of the American Revolution. Its influence still lingers in the American psyche today.

Patrick Spero is the Librarian and Director of American Philosophical Society Library. He is author of Frontier Country: The Politics of War in Early Pennsylvania

Michael Zuckerman is Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania

REVIEWS:

“The most important collection of essays on the Revolution to appear since the 1970s.”

—The Junto

“No serious scholar of the revolutionary era can afford to neglect this important and consistently interesting volume,which will surely secure a place in the historiographical pantheon alongside earlier classics.”

—The William and Mary Quarterly

“In the tradition of the best humanistic scholarship, Patrick Spero and Michael Zuckerman's The American Revolution Reborn is at once unsettling and edifying.”

—Journal of American History

“This excellent and eclectic volume points the way toward exciting new avenues of research in the history of the Revolution while simultaneously offering insights that will interest scholars of every stripe.”

—Journal of Interdisciplinary History

“This is the most ambitious state-of-the-field collection published since the American Revolution's bicentennial. Let's hope it is successful in charting new directions and arousing fruitful debates.”

—Thomas P. Slaughter, author of Independence: The Tangled Roots of the American Revolution

“The American Revolution appears in a fresh new light in this lively and wide-ranging collection of essays. The authors deftly explore a diverse and contested revolution rich in ironies and importance.”

—Alan Taylor, author of American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804

“i>The American Revolution Reborn is a state-of-the-field collection. Its essays rank among the best Revolutionary scholarship to emerge since the collapse of the republican synthesis. The authors reject heroic narratives, repudiate nationalist analyses, and blur the edges of allegiance, identity, and indifference.”

—Benjamin H. Irvin, University of Arizona

“The essays in this volume are careful, thought-provoking, and highly effective, and the conclusion issues a challenging and pungent demand that we abandon our comfortable assumptions.”

—Andrew Shankman, Rutgers University-Camden