Publisher Description
Grand in scope, rigorous in its arguments, and elegantly synthesizing thirty years of scholarship, Gordon S. Wood’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book analyzes the social, political, and economic consequences of 1776.
In The Radicalism of the American Revolution, Wood depicts not just a break with England, but the rejection of an entire way of life: of a society with feudal dependencies, a politics of patronage, and a world view in which people were divided between the nobility and “the Herd.” He shows how the theories of the country’s founders became realities that sometimes baffled and disappointed them. Above all, Bancroft Prize–winning historian Wood rescues the revolution from abstraction, allowing readers to see it with a true sense of its drama—and not a little awe.
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“Good stuff to ponder. Not the last word on the Revolution or anything, but certainly a fascinating collection of social and cultural history from America circa 1750 to 1820 or so. Wood is arguing against a belief that the American Revolution did not involve a “revolutionary upheaval,” and thus, did not involve real change. Since the Americans did not experience a reign of terror, or a Napoleonic dictator, Wood argues that it is easy to underestimate the American Revolution. Really, the whole way people thought about society was fundamentally changed. There was a huge difference between being subjects, and being citizens. There was a huge difference between seeing oneself as a courtier, looking for patronage appointments, and seeing oneself as a republican patriot. And there was a huge difference between seeing government as a system that should be run by wealthy people who were not engaged in dirty, money-grubbing commerce, and seeing government as a system that could ONLY be run by a mass of citizens, all out for their own interests, all dirty money-grubbers, all engaged in business. The Revolution to Wood, was the triumph of the middlers, the mass of common people all looking out for money, self-interest, and getting ahead, and for the late 18th century, this was revolutionary indeed.”
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John (4 out of 5 stars)
