Kategoria BISAC: History >> United States - Revolutionary Period (1775-1800)

In one of Common Sense's most ringing phrases, Thomas Paine declared it -absurd- for -a continent to be perpetually governed by an island.- Such powerful words, coupled with powerful ideas, helped spur the United States to independence.

In The Nation's Nature, James D. Drake examines how a relatively small number of inhabitants of the Americas, huddled along North America's east coast, came to mentally appropriate the entire continent and to think of their nation as America. Drake demonstrates how British North American colonists' participation in scientific debates...

Originally published in German in 1988, the late Jurgen Heideking's exhaustive study of the debates over the ratification of the U.S. Constitution compares the methods used to call state ratifying conventions and explores everything that made up the ratification debate, from town meetings and festive culture to private correspondence and print media. In Heideking's view, the construction of a new political process was an unintended but key result of ratification debates over the federal Constitution. Heideking's work anticipated diverse strands of subsequent scholarship; this translation...

This volume covers the middle months of the siege of Boston when George Washington faced the delicate task of disbanding one army and recruiting another, all within musket shot of the British forces. Throughout the fall of 1775, assisted and sometimes thwarted by congressmen, New England officials, and fellow officers, Washington laid plans not merely to keep a besieging force around Boston and provide his men with winter necessities but also to remodel the army to make it more efficient and truly continental, intermixing officers and men without regard to their colonial identity. The...

For Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Gordon S. Wood, the American Revolution is the most important event in our history, bar none. Since American identity is so fluid, we have had to continually return to our nation's founding to understand who we are. In a series of illuminating essays, he explores the ideological origins of the Revolution--from Ancient Rome to the European Enlightenment--and the founders' attempts to forge a...

Published by the Pennsylvania German Society in 1908, this volume is one among many compiled to help illuminate the achievements of the Pennsylvania Germans during our nation's early years. In the pre-World War I era, such works were written to dismiss the common belief that "the German element of this country has been practically a non-entity in its development" and to lift the "curtain of ignorance" on the subject. In this volume, Henry Melchior Muhlenberg Richards takes on this task by examining the role played by Pennsylvania Germans during the American Revolution.

In eighteen...

In recent years historians of the American Revolution have become increasingly convinced that political ideas, rather than material interests, were what ultimately led American colonists to fight for independence from Great Britain. During the years preceding the Revolution, Americans explained their resistance to British rule in principled terms. They understood liberty to be something real, valuable, and seriously threatened by British actions that were not merely impolitic but fundamentally unjust. American statesmen contended that certain basic principles had to rule governments, and...