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Indlæser... The King's Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688-1776af Brendan McConville
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At the center of McConville's wide-ranging book is the claim that royalism—not Parliament-centered constitutionalism, not incipient democracy—was the central feature of the colonies' shared political culture. While the Glorious Revolution gave England its king-in-parliament, it gave the colonies a "Protestant political culture built around a cult of benevolent monarchy". The King's Three Faces explores the forms that royalism took in the colonies and challenges the "'whiggish' and teleological history" that, according to McConville, still dominates the history of political culture in British North America. Though the book's argument is not wholly persuasive and its revisionism is overstated, there is a great deal of value and interest in its pages. Belongs to Series
Reinterpreting the first century of American history, Brendan McConville argues that colonial society developed a political culture marked by strong attachment to Great Britain's monarchs. This intense allegiance continued almost until the moment of independence, an event defined by an emotional break with the king. By reading American history forward from the seventeenth century rather than backward from the Revolution, McConville shows that political conflicts long assumed to foreshadow the events of 1776 were in fact fought out by factions who invoked competing visions of the king and appropriated royal rites rather than used abstract republican rights or pro-democratic proclamations. The American Revolution, McConville contends, emerged out of the fissure caused by the unstable mix of affective attachments to the king and a weak imperial government. Sure to provoke debate, The King's Three Faces offers a powerful counterthesis to dominant American historiography. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Indlæser... GenrerMelvil Decimal System (DDC)973.2History and Geography North America United States Colonial period (1607-1775)LC-klassificeringVurderingGennemsnit:
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McConville's fundamental argument is that royalism in the American colonies ran very deeply from the time of the Glorious Revolution (1688) to the very start of the Revolutionary War in 1775-6. Over those decades, he maintains, rites and ceremonies honoring the British monarchs became engrained in the American way of life; this led to the creation of an emotional tie between the individual and the ruler that grew stronger through the early decades of the eighteenth century. Simultaneously in England, the people's bond with the monarch grew weaker while their support for parliament increased. McConville calls this trend paradoxical, but I think if he'd examined Americans' support for their elected colonial legislatures he would have found an important parallel that is entirely absent from this treatment.
The best portions of this book were those describing the various ceremonies used to honor the English monarchs and their families, as well as McConville's discussion of royal images as they were put to use in colonial America. I also was quite impressed with the section on a few of the proposals for structural redesigns of the imperial scheme that could well have averted the military revolution: McConville argues that because these were proffered by "outsiders" (that is, not by imperial bureaucrats who would have had to support any such changes for them to be effected), all such efforts were bound to fail. Nonetheless, there were some very imaginative plans put forth!
As McConville correctly notes, Americans' final break with George III was both abrupt and passionate - it was thought well through the first months of the Revolution that the monarch would not prosecute a war against the colonies, and when it became clear this was a misguided hope, the rupture was both fierce and extreme (witness the pulling down of the royal statue in New York City, for example). This is not a new argument, but its complementary piece (the long-running colonial feud with Parliament) is an important element in the runup to Revolution that McConville omits.
Since I always gripe about poor practices with footnotes, I must add some words of praise for this book: UNC Press has put McConville's references right where they belong, at the bottom of the page. Only the absence of a full bibliography is to be lamented in this case.
The King's Three Faces is a well-written book; it simply tries to make too much of a splash by claiming to "reinterpret history"; McConville's excellent examination of American colonial royalism would stand quite firmly on its own.
http://philobiblos.blogspot.com/2006/12/book-review-kings-three-faces.html ( )