Reviews in American History

While the violent events of March 5, 1770 on the streets of Boston are well known to every American, as Holger Hoock notes, for many this episode is the extent of the Revolution's chaotic nature. Less etched into the annals of history are stories such as the exploits of the intrusive committees of safety as they investigated loyalty or the destruction of towns like Norfolk. Vanished are the experiences of individuals like wagoner John Becker who, rather than glorify the era, recalled years later how he hoped to avoid the turmoil of war and disdained the culture of suspicion the conflict fostered. However, violent stories of a divisive civil war are not the only new direction scholars of the American Revolution are forging. Seeking to reinvigorate the field, both Hoock's Scars of Independence and Patrick Spero and Michael Zuckerman's edited collection, The American Revolution Reborn, challenge historians to re-conceptualize this defining period of United States history. Contributors to the edited volume and Hoock all hope to avoid a teleological approach. Instead, they encourage researchers and readers alike to focus on the lived experience of Americans during a period of violence and upheaval.

Both works challenge the old paradigms that past scholars have utilized to illuminate the American Revolution's origins and significance. Arguing that historians must abandon the strict traditional interpretations, such as the neo-Whig, neo-progressive, and neo-imperial schools of thought, which obscure more than they reveal, Spero reminds scholars that we should not feel bound to an "obligation to clarify the past" (Spero and Zuckerman, p. 4). Complicating the past is important, too. Similar to other scholars' approach in recent years, the contributors to The American Revolution Reborn and Hoock have grown frustrated with an insistence of the importance of ideology. Rather than stress ideology and synthesis, The American Revolution Reborn encourages [End Page 183] historians to "embrace the diversity of experience[s]," while Hoock reminds us that the Revolution was indeed a violent civil war (Spero and Zuckerman, p. 4). In fact, both works refrain from glorifying the narrative. Resurrecting and adapting John Shy's assertion in A People Numerous and Armed (rev. ed., 2004), Zuckerman rejects the notion that a majority of Americans supported independence during the war years. Far from a unifying force, the Revolution was a "nest of civil wars" fought for a variety of reasons (p. 313). Rather than a triumphal tale, the Revolution is a story of a vocal, and even hostile, minority willing to engage in coercive means to achieve their goals.

One of the major strengths of these works is the authors' insistence that selective memory of the American Revolution has obscured our understanding of the period. Soon after the conflict concluded Americans began downplaying its divisive and brutal side. By doing so, they popularized a narrative of unity and American exceptionalism that has continued to inform our consciousness. Hoock and the contributors to The American Revolution Reborn are in dialogue with a rising tide of historians who foreground disunity and conflict. While these historians might differ in the degree of severity or the Revolution's legacy, Michael A. McDonnell's The Politics of War (2007), T. H. Breen's American Insurgents, American Patriots (2010), Charles Patrick Neimeyer's America Goes to War (1996), and Alan Taylor's American Revolutions (2016) each exposed a chaotic moment of uncertainty and disunity. Similarly, in American Leviathan (2007), Patrick Griffin illuminated the brutal experience on the frontier. Others such as Sarah Purcell, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, and Carol Berkin have uncovered the difficulties Americans faced when forging an identity in the new nation. In Purcell's Sealed with Blood (2002), this effort sometimes included expunging the violence and discord while in This Violent Empire (2010), Smith-Rosenberg contended that the artificial creation and exclusion of 'the Other' fostered an American identity. Berkin...