The success of the American Revolution is less likely to be
understood through an examination of its ideological origins than
through a close analysis of the political processes by which
principles, beliefs, and anxieties were translated into
revolutionary action. This book offers the first detailed profile
of the several hundred obscure committeemen and propagandists who
took up the new revolutionary ideology and carried it that one last
step: out of the realm of rhetoric and into the domain of concrete
change. And participatory democracy as a principle of American
government owes its realization largely to these second-rank
politicians and ordinary citizens, who provided the basic muscle of
Revolutionary politics.In the 1760s and early 1770s Pennsylvania
lacked nearly every ingredient for revolution found elsewhere in
the colonies: a strong dissenting tradition, widely felt economic
grievances, or a legislature intimately acquainted with royal
government. Only the painstaking enlistment of a strong leadership
core, the construction of new political institutions, and the rapid
mobilization of the majority of the community could overcome these
deficiencies. In Pennsylvania British authority succumbed to the
activity of a few hundred men who were drawn into public life by a
handful of veteran politicians within just two years. To these men
and to their committees Pennsylvania owes its revolution.In his
book Richard Alan Ryerson focuses on the daily business of politics
in the Revolutionary period--the art of motivation for radical
political purposes--and its economic and social dimensions in the
most prominent American city of the time. How were the colonists
mobilized for resistance? What was the political process? Who were
the disaffected people who became the radical leaders of the
Philadelphia community?To answer these questions, Ryerson compares
campaigning styles, nomination and election procedures, and local
political organizations in the colonial era with their counterparts
during the Revolution. He also examines the age, economic status,
religious faith, and national origins of the men who formed the
radical committees of Philadelphia between 1765 and 1776.
General
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