Volume 37, Number 14 · September 27, 1990
Americans and Revolutionaries
By Gordon S. Wood
Revolutions: Reflections on American Equality and Foreign Liberations
by David Brion Davis
Harvard University Press, 130 pp., $19.95
Revolutions is a very timely book, more timely surely than the author, David Brion Davis, Sterling Professor of History at Yale, could have realized when he presented it as the William E. Massey Lectures in the History of American Civilization at Harvard University in May 1989. Since that date revolutions have occurred with great rapidity in Eastern Europe, and their end may not be yet in sight. How will the United States respond to all these repudiations by Communist nations of their revolutionary past? What meaning does revolution today have for Americans whose country was itself born in revolution? And what is the relationship of equality to revolution and how do our ideas of equality change in response to foreign revolutions? Davis's short book offers us some historical perspective for dealing with questions like these.
Review, 4422 words
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