This volume brings together sixteen essays on the American Revolution by leading historian Jack Greene. Originally published between 1972 and the early nineties, these essays approach the Revolution as an episode in British imperial history rather than as the first step in the creation of an American nation.

In Understanding the American Revolution, Greene explores such problems as Virginia's political behavior during the Revolutionary era; the roles of three cultural brokers, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, and Philip Mazzei; and why the Revolution had such a short half-life as a model for large-scale revolutions. He explores the colonial roots of the political structures that Revolutionary leaders created, and he asks why the American Revolution was not more radical.

This volume gathers personal recollections by fifteen eminent historians of the American South. Coming from distinctive backgrounds, traveling diverse career paths, and practicing different kinds of history, the contributors exemplify the field's richness on many levels. As they reflect on why they joined the profession and chose their particular research specialties, these historians write eloquently of family and upbringing, teachers and mentors, defining events and serendipitous opportunities. The struggle for civil rights was the defining experience for several contributors. Peter H. Wood remembers how black fans of the St. Louis Cardinals erupted in applause for the Dodgers' Jackie Robinson. ""I realized for the first time,"" writes Wood, ""that there must be something even bigger than hometown loyalties dividing Americans."" Gender equality is another frequent concern in the essays. Anne Firor Scott tells of her advisor's ridicule when childbirth twice delayed Scott's dissertation: ""With great effort I managed to write two chapters, but Professor Handlin was moved to inquire whether I planned to have a baby every chapter."" Yet another prominent theme is the reconciliation of the professional and the personal, as when Bill C. Malone traces his scholarly interests back to ""the memories of growing up poor on an East Texas cotton farm and finding escape and diversion in the sounds of hillbilly music."" Always candid and often witty, each essay is a road map through the intellectual terrain of southern history as practiced during the last half of the twentieth century.

In the Age of Democratic Revolution, countries on both sides of the Atlantic were linked together through trade networks, diplomatic ties, and social interactions. More importantly, however, they also shared a common revolutionary dynamic that oscillated back and forth across the ocean. Revolutionary Currents explores the global crosscurrents and revolutionary ideologies that inspired four great modern revolutions England's Glorious Revolution of 1688-89, the American Revolution of 1776, the French Revolution in 1789, and the Mexican Revolution in the early 1800s. Michael A. Morrison and Melinda S. Zook bring together noted historians to look at how each nation reshaped these revolutionary traditions, making them their own, and exported them once again. In examining each event, the contributors respond to the historiographical trends of revolutionary ideology, transatlantic cross-fertilzation of ideas, and nation-building. In assessing and analyzing the ideas, traditions, and nationalisms that inspired revolution and nation-building in the modern world, this book breaks new ground in the area of transatlantic history."

In the Age of Democratic Revolution, countries on both sides of the Atlantic were linked together through trade networks, diplomatic ties, and social interactions. More importantly, however, they also shared a common revolutionary dynamic that oscillated back and forth across the ocean. Revolutionary Currents explores the global crosscurrents and revolutionary ideologies that inspired four great modern revolutions-England's Glorious Revolution of 1688-89, the American Revolution of 1776, the French Revolution in 1789, and the Mexican Revolution in the early 1800s. Michael A. Morrison and Melinda S. Zook bring together noted historians to look at how each nation reshaped these revolutionary traditions, making them their own, and exported them once again. In examining each event, the contributors respond to the historiographical trends of revolutionary ideology, transatlantic cross-fertilzation of ideas, and nation-building. In assessing and analyzing the ideas, traditions, and nationalisms that inspired revolution and nation-building in the modern world, this book breaks new ground in the area of transatlantic history.

This second part of an eight-volume reset edition, traces the evolution of imperial and colonial ideologies during the British colonization of America. It covers the period from 1764 to the end of the American Revolutionary War in 1783.

This first part of an eight-volume reset edition, traces the evolution of imperial and colonial ideologies during the British colonization of America. It covers the period from the founding of the Jamestown colony in Virginia in 1607 to 1764.

Using the British Empire as a case study, this succinct study argues that the establishment of overseas settlements in America created a problem of constitutional organization. The failure to resolve the resulting tensions led to the thirteen continental colonies seceding from the empire in 1776. Challenging those historians who have assumed that the British had the law on their side during the debates that led to the American Revolution, this volume argues that the empire had long exhibited a high degree of constitutional multiplicity, with each colony having its own discrete constitution. Contending that these constitutions cannot be conflated with the metropolitan British constitution, it argues that British refusal to accept the legitimacy of colonial understandings of the sanctity of the many colonial constitutions and the imperial constitution was the critical element leading to the American Revolution.

Using the British Empire as a case study, this succinct study argues that the establishment of overseas settlements in America created a problem of constitutional organization. The failure to resolve the resulting tensions led to the thirteen continental colonies seceding from the empire in 1776. Challenging those historians who have assumed that the British had the law on their side during the debates that led to the American Revolution, this volume argues that the empire had long exhibited a high degree of constitutional multiplicity, with each colony having its own discrete constitution. Contending that these constitutions cannot be conflated with the metropolitan British constitution, it argues that British refusal to accept the legitimacy of colonial understandings of the sanctity of the many colonial constitutions and the imperial constitution was the critical element leading to the American Revolution.

Consisting of an introduction and ten chapters, Exclusionary Empire examines the transfer of English traditions of liberty and the rule of law overseas from 1600 to 1900. Each chapter is written by a noted specialist and focuses on a particular area of the settler empire - Colonial North America, the West Indies, Ireland, the early United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa - and on one non-settler colony, India. The book examines the ways in which the polities in each of these areas incorporated these traditions, paying particular attention to the extent to which these traditions were confined to the independent white male segments of society and denied to most others. This collection will be invaluable to all those interested in the history of colonialism, European expansion, the development of empire, the role of cultural inheritance in those histories, and the confinement of access to that inheritance to people of European descent.

Consisting of an introduction and ten chapters, Exclusionary Empire examines the transfer of English traditions of liberty and the rule of law overseas from 1600 to 1900. Each chapter is written by a noted specialist and focuses on a particular area of the settler empire - Colonial North America, the West Indies, Ireland, the early United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa - and on one non-settler colony, India. The book examines the ways in which the polities in each of these areas incorporated these traditions, paying particular attention to the extent to which these traditions were confined to the independent white male segments of society and denied to most others. This collection will be invaluable to all those interested in the history of colonialism, European expansion, the development of empire, the role of cultural inheritance in those histories, and the confinement of access to that inheritance to people of European descent.

This volume comprehensively examines how metropolitan Britons spoke and wrote about the British Empire during the short eighteenth century, from about 1730 to 1790. The work argues that following several decades of largely uncritical celebration of the empire as a vibrant commercial entity that had made Britain prosperous and powerful, a growing familiarity with the character of overseas territories and their inhabitants during and after the Seven Years' War produced a substantial critique of empire. This critique evolved out of a widespread revulsion against the behaviours exhibited by Britons overseas and built on a language of 'otherness' that metropolitans had used since the beginning of overseas expansion to describe its participants, the societies and polities that Britons abroad constructed in their new habitats. It used the languages of humanity and justice as standards to evaluate and condemn the behaviours of both overseas Britons and subaltern people in the British Empire, whether in India, the Americas, Africa or Ireland.

This volume comprehensively examines how metropolitan Britons spoke and wrote about the British Empire during the short eighteenth century, from about 1730 to 1790. The work argues that following several decades of largely uncritical celebration of the empire as a vibrant commercial entity that had made Britain prosperous and powerful, a growing familiarity with the character of overseas territories and their inhabitants during and after the Seven Years' War produced a substantial critique of empire. This critique evolved out of a widespread revulsion against the behaviours exhibited by Britons overseas and built on a language of 'otherness' that metropolitans had used since the beginning of overseas expansion to describe its participants, the societies and polities that Britons abroad constructed in their new habitats. It used the languages of humanity and justice as standards to evaluate and condemn the behaviours of both overseas Britons and subaltern people in the British Empire, whether in India, the Americas, Africa or Ireland.

"Taken together, these essays constitute a better summing up--part critique, part appreciation--than anything else in print of work done in any field of American history. Nowhere else can we learn so easily and so well what to read about colonial America. . . . A very useful volume of considerable distinction."--William Abbott, editor, "The Papers of George Washington."

Jack Greene explores the changing definitions of America from the time of Europe's first contact with the New World through the establishment of the American republic. Challenging historians who have argued that colonial American societies differed little from those of early modern Europe, he shows that virtually all contemporary observers emphasized the distinctiveness of the new worlds being created in America. Rarely considering the high costs paid by Amerindians and Africans in the construction of those worlds, they cited the British North American colonies as evidence that America was for free people a place of exceptional opportunities for individual betterment and was therefore fundamentally different from the Old World.

Greene suggests that this concept of American societies as exceptional was a central component in their emerging identity. The success of the American Revolution helped subordinate Americans' long-standing sense of cultural inferiority to a more positive sense of collective self that sharpened and intensified the concept of American exceptionalism.

In this book, Jack Greene reinterprets the meaning of American social development. Synthesizing literature of the previous two decades on the process of social development and the formation of American culture, he challenges the central assumptions that have traditionally been used to analyze colonial British American history.
Greene argues that the New England declension model traditionally employed by historians is inappropriate for describing social change in all the other early modern British colonies. The settler societies established in Ireland, the Atlantic island colonies of Bermuda and the Bahamas, the West Indies, the Middle Colonies, and the Lower South followed instead a pattern first exhibited in America in the Chesapeake. That pattern involved a process in which these new societies slowly developed into more elaborate cultural entities, each of which had its own distinctive features.
Greene also stresses the social and cultural convergence between New England and the other regions of colonial British America after 1710 and argues that by the eve of the American Revolution Britain's North American colonies were both more alike and more like the parent society than ever before. He contends as well that the salient features of an emerging American culture during these years are to be found not primarily in New England puritanism but in widely manifest configurations of sociocultural behavior exhibited throughout British North America, including New England, and he emphasized the centrality of slavery to that culture.

These ten essays constitute "a distinctive contribution to the enticing but treacherous domain of a comparative history. (The book) succeeds because it is written by qualified scholars who address a delimited, manageable subject" ("American Historical Review").

Between 1737 and 1746, James Knight a merchant, planter, and sometime Crown official and legislator in Jamaica wrote a massive two-volume history of the island. The first volume provided a narrative of the colony's development up to the mid-1740s, while the second offered a broad survey of most aspects of Jamaican life as it had developed by the third and fourth decades of the eighteenth century. Completed not long before his death in the winter of 1746-47 and held in the British Library, this work is now published for the first time. Well researched and intelligently critical, Knight's work is not only the most comprehensive account of Jamaica's ninety years as an English colony ever written; it is also one of the best representations of the provincial mentality as it had emerged in colonial British America between the founding of Virginia and 1750. Expertly edited and introduced by renowned scholar Jack Greene, this volume represents a colonial Caribbean history unique in its contemporary perspective, detail, and scope.

To Great Britain in the seventeenth century, and then to the fledgling United States, no problem was more urgent than how to divide authority between local powers and the governing central power. In this book the noted colonial historian Jack P. Greene traces the search for solutions.

This collection of essays grew out of a symposium commemorating the 250th anniversary of the founding of Georgia. The contributors are authorities in their respective fields and their efforts represent not only the fruits of long careers but also the observations and insights of some of the most promising young scholars. "Forty Years of Diversity" sheds new light on the social, political, religious, and ethnic diversity of colonial Georgia.

This volume brings together sixteen essays on the American Revolution by leading historian Jack Greene. Originally published between 1972 and the early nineties, these essays approach the Revolution as an episode in British imperial history rather than as the first step in the creation of an American nation.

In Understanding the American Revolution, Greene explores such problems as Virginia's political behavior during the Revolutionary era; the roles of three cultural brokers, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, and Philip Mazzei; and why the Revolution had such a short half-life as a model for large-scale revolutions. He explores the colonial roots of the political structures that Revolutionary leaders created, and he asks why the American Revolution was not more radical.

Intended as a plausible psychological and intellectual portrait of Landon Carter, thi study attempts to delineate his central character traits and personal values. It calls attention to what motivated him, to the major problems he encountered, how he sought to solve them, and how well he succeeded. His world is viewed in much the way he must have seen it. The book is also an inquiry into the personal values and social imperatives of the eighteenth-century Virginia gentry, for Carter exemplifies the ideas and assumptions that gave structure and coherence to the private and public worlds of that extraordinary group.