Volume 30, Number 1 · February 3, 1983
This Land Is Our Land
By Gordon S. Wood
The Fall of the First British Empire: Origins of the War of American Independence
by Robert W. Tucker, by David C. Hendrickson
Johns Hopkins University Press, 450 pp., $24.00
A People in Revolution: The American Revolution and Political Society in New York, 1760-1790
by Edward Countryman
Johns Hopkins University Press, 388 pp., $24.50
Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority, 1750-1800
by Jay Fliegelman
Cambridge University Press, 328 pp., $24.95
The American Revolution has always appeared to be a strange revolution. It seems very different from the other great modern revolutions, the French and Russian, which presumably arose out of real oppression and real deprivations. The eighteenth-century colonists who revolted were not by any stretch of the imagination an oppressed people. They had no crushing monarchical or imperial chains to throw off. There were few vestiges of feudalism left in colonial America, and there was little of the widespread poverty still afflicting France and Britain. Nowhere in America was there anything comparable to the vile and violent gin-soaked slums of London. In America there were no great aristocrats like those of eighteenth-century England who built such magnificent palaces for themselves. William Byrd's Virginia Westover was one of the largest of colonial mansions. Yet it was scarcely a tenth of the size of the marquess of Rockingham's country house, Wentworth Woodhouse, which was longer than two football fields.
Review, 6036 words
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