Written when political and military history dominated the
discipline, J. Franklin Jameson's "The American Revolution"
Considered as a Social Movement was a pioneering work. Based on a
series of four lectures he gave at Princeton University in 1925,
the short book argued that the most salient feature of the American
Revolution had not been the war for independence from Great
Britain; it was, rather, the struggle between aristocratic values
and those of the common people who tended toward a leveling
democracy. American revolutionaries sought to change their
government, not their society, but in destroying monarchy and
establishing republics, they in fact changed their society
profoundly. Jameson wrote, "The stream of revolution, once started,
could not be con.ned within narrow banks, but spread abroad upon
the land."
Jameson's book was among the first to bring social analysis to
the fore of American history. Examining the effects the American
Revolution had on business, intellectual and religious life,
slavery, land ownership, and interactions between members of
different social classes, Jameson showed the extent of the social
reforms won at home during the war. By looking beyond the political
and probing the social aspects of this seminal event, Jameson
forced a reexamination of revolution as a social phenomenon and, as
one reviewer put it, injected a "liberal spirit" into the study of
American history. Still in print after nearly eighty years, the
book is a classic of American historiography.
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