Linda Kerber "The Revolutionary Generation"

Placing recent work within a context of progressive (Early 20th C), consensus history (Post-WWII) and current categories of analysis growing out of the politics of the Vietnam generation, Kerber provides an overview of the field in terms of the new work in the history of ideologies, experience and politics of the generation of the American Revolution. She begins with work on the ideologies of Republicanism and Patriarchy Experiences which historians have recently studied include economic transformation, slavery, religious revival, and numeracy and literacy (Reading, Writing and Arithmetic) Yet another thread of analysis runs through politics of mobilization, Indian relations and the federal constitution.

New work on the revolution placed in historiographical context and contextualized relative to 20th Century politics. New history stresses the radicalism of the American Revolution, focuses on ideology broadly considered and the history of marginalized groups. Same questions are still asked, but answers are more complex:

Why did the least taxed people in the Western world make a revolution over modest tax increases?

Is the American Revolution best understood as a conservative or a radical upheaval?

How did a disparate set of newly independent states stabilize their revolution and create a lasting nation?

See Bloch on virtue and republicanism. Patriarchy weakened alongside deferential behavior. Decline of deference in the early republic.

Traditional explanation of the causes of the war still stand, taxation without representation was a causus belli, though now historians point out the relatively low level of taxes and the high level of rhetoric.

What did change economically was a shift from Mercantilism to Laisez Faire economics, with the gradual ascendancy of the ideas of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. Artisan production was being undermined on both sides of the Atlantic in the face of a commercial revolution and a nascent technological revolution (1790 Slater's Mill in Pawtucket, RI and A Hamilton's Report on Manufactures).

African Americans had the experience of fighting on both sides of the war. This experience served in small measure exposed them to different masters and to a language with which to advocate their own liberation, yet neither the colonists nor the British sought to liberate the Black slave as part of the conflict. Indeed, the British were fearful that they would loose the support of loyalists in the south were they to proceed too rapidly with liberating schemes. After the war, in the early republic, slavery expanded greatly in the south. With the development of the cotton gin and the opening of the old Southwest, slavery was to help solidify sectional divisions in the new nation. The 3/5ths Compromise settled the slavery issue (temporarily) at the constitutional convention, but only postponed the ultimate confrontation with the inherent conflicts in a national order which would eventually become, as Abraham Lincoln was to note, "half slave and half free".

Renewed significance now assigned to religion as well. Whereas the lack of religious fervor on the part of the Revolutionary Generation had become a mantra repeated from lecterns for several decades, recently historians have discovered that the First Great Awakening of the 1840s played a very important role in radicalizing colonial thought. As evangelical Protestantism questioned the Church of England, so too would the intellectual fervor generated by the revivals help undermine the bonds of loyalty to the Institution of Kingship. Religious revivalism offered women an avenue to cultural and social power which politics did not.

Another area of change in the early republic was that of literacy and numeracy. The commercial revolution of the late 18th century made these skills practical requirements for success for many. As the need for these skills grew, the expansion of education followed. Women's involvement in education of the young expanded into the 19th century when a new generation of women staffed the common schools in the 1830s.

Studies of political mobilization in England (E. P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm) and France (George Rude) have reveled that crowds enforced a "moral economy". More than just unruly mobs of criminal elements, these gathering had the effect of enforcing local moral standards on wayward citizens. The same dynamic has been shown to be at work in the American colonial context. Local elites in the colonies often supported these mob actions, a testament to their feelings of disfranchisement. Military historians have shown how these mobilizations served as precursors to the militia mobilization of the pre-war period. The war itself served as a socialization process for the men who served. This could have dangerous consequences for the republic, as Shays Rebellion (1786) and the Whiskey Rebellion (1794-97) demonstrated. Despite the desire to avoid standing armies, the nation moved rather quickly to professionalize the military service. Thomas Jefferson, advocate of the republic of virtuous farmers, founded the first military academy during his presidency.

Complexity and diversity of Indian relations and the importance of understanding the Native American through the glass of native American mores and not those of white Americans.

The Constitutional Convention served as a way of institutionalizing the Revolution. Debates over the bill of rights represented real differences over the need to protect the rights of the minority against the abuse of power by a majority of citizens. The document itself assumed the burden of encoding the ideals of the revolution and became, in the words of Pauline Maier, a sacred text. Another irony of the process of institutionalizing the Revolution was the two-party system. Americans were successful in avoiding the cycles of revolution and counter-revolution that have plagued other nations in the modern world precisely because the revolutionary generation developed a working mechanism for loyal opposition. Embedded in a web of voluntary organizations, political parties emerged from the revolutionary generation in spite of this aversion to "factions."