In its early years, the American Republic was far from stable. Conflict and violence, including major land wars, were defining features of the period from the Revolution to the outbreak of the Civil War, as struggles over who would control land and labor were waged across the North American continent. The World of the Revolutionary American Republic brings together original essays from an array of scholars to illuminate the issues that made this era so contested. Drawing on the latest research, the essays examine the conflicts that occurred both within the Republic and between the different peoples inhabiting the continent. Covering issues including slavery, westward expansion, the impact of Revolutionary ideals, and the economy, this collection provides a diverse range of insights into the turbulent era in which the United States emerged as a nation. With contributions from leading scholars in the field, both American and international, The World of the Revolutionary American Republic is an important resource for any scholar of early America.

In its early years, the American Republic was far from stable. Conflict and violence, including major land wars, were defining features of the period from the Revolution to the outbreak of the Civil War, as struggles over who would control land and labor were waged across the North American continent. The World of the Revolutionary American Republic brings together original essays from an array of scholars to illuminate the issues that made this era so contested. Drawing on the latest research, the essays examine the conflicts that occurred both within the Republic and between the different peoples inhabiting the continent. Covering issues including slavery, westward expansion, the impact of Revolutionary ideals, and the economy, this collection provides a diverse range of insights into the turbulent era in which the United States emerged as a nation. With contributions from leading scholars in the field, both American and international, The World of the Revolutionary American Republic is an important resource for any scholar of early America.

For five decades John M. Murrin has been the consummate historian's historian. This volume brings together his seminal essays on the American Revolution, the United States Constitution, and the early American Republic. Collectively, these essays rethink fundamental questions regarding American identity, the reasons why colonists felt compelled to declare their independence, and the myriad ways that the American Revolution produced a profoundly transformative change in those who lived through it. They reconsider questions that have shaped the field for several generations and connect those questions to issues of central interest to historians working today. Collectively, the essays gathered here argue that the great historiographical schools that have long competed to explain the American Revolution must move towards a synthesis that allows the whole to be greater than the parts. The essays show how high politics and the study of constitutional and ideological questions-broadly the history of elites-must be considered in close conjunction with issues of economic inequality, class conflict, and racial division. By bringing together different historiographical schools and a variety of perspectives in both Britain and the North American colonies, Rethinking America explains why what began as constitutional argument that virtually all expected would remain contained within the British Empire exploded into a truly subversive, destructive, and radical revolution that destroyed monarchy and aristocracy and replaced it with a rapidly transforming and wildly pulsing republic. The essays examining the period of the early American Republic discuss why the Founders' assumptions about what their Revolution would produce were profoundly different than the society that emerged from the American Revolution. In many ways, the outcome of the American Revolution put the new United States on a path to a violent and bloody civil war, as is shown by an essay directly comparing the American colonists of 1776 to the Confederate States of America in 1861. A much anticipated work, this volume offers both groundbreaking and timeless analysis of the nation's critical first decades as it moved from empire to republic.

The thirteen mainland colonies of early America were arguably never more British than on the eve of their War of Independence from Britain. Though home to settlers of diverse national and cultural backgrounds, colonial America gradually became more like Britain in its political and judicial systems, material culture, economies, religious systems, and engagements with the empire. At the same time and by the same process, these politically distinct and geographically distant colonies forged a shared cultural identity-one that would bind them together as a nation during the Revolution. Anglicizing America revisits the theory of Anglicization, considering its application to the history of the Atlantic world, from Britain to the Caribbean to the western wildernesses, at key moments before, during, and after the American Revolution. Ten essays by senior historians trace the complex processes by which global forces, local economies, and individual motives interacted to reinforce a more centralized and unified social movement. They examine the ways English ideas about labor influenced plantation slavery, how Great Britain's imperial aspirations shaped American militarization, the influence of religious tolerance on political unity, and how Americans' relationship to Great Britain after the war impacted the early republic's naval and taxation policies. As a whole, Anglicizing America offers a compelling framework for explaining the complex processes at work in the western hemisphere during the age of revolutions. Contributors: Denver Brunsman, William Howard Carter, Ignacio Gallup-Diaz, Anthony M. Joseph, Simon P. Newman, Geoffrey Plank, Nancy L. Rhoden, Andrew Shankman, David J. Silverman, Jeremy A. Stern.