A reader ought to begin with R. R. Palmer’s monumental work The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800 (2 vols., 1959, 1964), which places the American Revolution in a comparative Atlantic world perspective. Robert Middlekauff, The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763–1789 (1982), is a good single-volume account of the Revolution that stresses the military conflict. There are a number of valuable collections of original essays on various aspects of the Revolution, including Stephen G. Kurtz and James H. Hutson, eds., Essays on the American Revolution (1973); Alfred F. Young, ed., The American Revolution(1976); Young, ed., Beyond the American Revolution (1993); the five volumes from the Library of Congress Symposia on the American Revolution (1972–76); and the many volumes on various aspects of the Revolutionary era edited by Ronald Hoffman et al. for the United States Capitol Historical Society.
Among the many attempts to treat the coming of the Revolution from an imperial viewpoint, Lawrence H. Gipson, The British Empire Before the American Revolution (15 vols., 1936–70), is the most detailed. Gipson has summarized his massive work in The Coming of the Revolution, 1763–1775 (1954). For a critical account of British policy, see Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson, The Fall of the First British Empire (1982). Jack P. Greene, The Quest for Power: The Lower Houses of Assembly in the Southern Royal Colonies, 1689–1776 (1963), stresses the desire of the colonial legislatures for control of their societies. An ingenious but sound study that combines the views of a British and an American historian on the causes of the Revolution is Ian R. Christie and Benjamin W. Labaree, Empire or Independence, 1760–1776 (1976). Theodore Draper, A Struggle for Power: The American Revolution (1996), plays down the importance of ideas in bringing on the Revolution.
Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1992), attempts to show that eighteenth-century monarchical society and culture were transformed by the Revolution. Jon Butler, Becoming America: The Revolution Before 1776 (2000), argues that the fundamental changes in American society occurred before the Declaration of Independence. On the “consumer revolution,” see T. H. Breen, “ ‘Baubles of Britain’: The American and Consumer Revolutions of the Eighteenth Century,” in Cary Carson et al., eds., Of Consuming Interests: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth Century (1994). Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790 (1982), uses anthropological techniques to illuminate the popular challenges to the Virginia aristocracy. Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in Revolt(1955), attributes the Revolutionary impulse to the cities. Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness and the Origins of the American Revolution (1979), stresses urban class conflict in bringing on the Revolution. Stimulating overviews of the mid-eighteenth-century Atlantic world in motion are Bernard Bailyn, The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction (1986), and Bailyn, Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution (1986). The extent of westward migration is ably recounted in Jack M. Sosin, Revolutionary Frontier, 1763–1783 (1967). Carl Bridenbaugh, Mitre and Sceptre (1962), describes the growth of Anglicanism and the effort to establish an American episcopacy in the decades leading up to the Revolution. J. C. D. Clark, The Language of Liberty, 1660–1832 (1994), sees the Revolution as a civil war over religion.
The opening years of the reign of George III were the subject of some of the most exciting historical scholarship in the twentieth century—largely the work of Sir Lewis Namier and his students. Namier and his followers exhaustively demonstrated that George III was not seeking to destroy the British constitution, as nineteenth-century historians had argued, and that in 1760 party government with ministerial responsibility to Parliament lay very much in the future. Namier’s chief works include The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (2d ed., 1957) and England in the Age of the American Revolution (2d ed., 1961). For detailed studies of British politics in the Revolutionary era, see P. D. G. Thomas’s three volumes on the several phases of the imperial crisis. For additional works, see Paul Langford, The First Rockingham Administration: 1765–1766 (1973); John Brooke, The Chatham Administration, 1766–1768 (1956); Bernard Donoughue, British Politics and the American Revolution: The Path to War, 1773–1775 (1964); and Eligia H. Gould, The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution. A good biography of George III is John Brooke, King George III (1972). For a study that reconciles the Whig and Namierite interpretations, see John Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (1976).
On the British military in America, see John Shy, Toward Lexington: The Role of the British Army in the Coming of the American Revolution (1965), and Ned R. Stout, The Royal Navy in America, 1760–1776 (1973).
On American resistance, see especially Pauline Maier, From Resistance to Revolution (1972), which stresses the limited and controlled character of American opposition. On urban mobs, see Paul A. Gilje, The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 1763–1834 (1987).
On other irritants and incidents in the imperial relationship, see Joseph A. Ernst, Money and Politics in America, 1755–1775 (1973); Carl Ubbelohde, The Vice-Admiralty Courts and the American Revolution (1960); M. H. Smith, The Writs of Assistance Case (1978); Hiller Zobel, The Boston Massacre (1970); Benjamin W. Labaree, The Boston Tea Party (1964); and David Ammerman, In the Common Cause: American Response to the Coercive Acts of 1774 (1974).
Among the many local studies of American resistance are Carl Becker, The History of Political Parties in the Province of New York, 1760–1776 (1909); Edward Countryman, A People in Revolution: The American Revolution and Political Society in New York, 1760–1790 (1981); David S. Lovejoy, Rhode Island Politics and the American Revolution, 1760–1776 (1958); Theodore Thayer, Pennsylvania Politics and the Growth of Democracy, 1740–1776 (1954); Richard Ryerson, “The Revolution Is Now Begun”: The Radical Committees of Philadelphia, 1765–1776 (1978); Patricia Bonomi, A Factious People: Politics and Society in Colonial New York (1971); Jere R. Daniel, Experiment in Republicanism: New Hampshire Politics and the American Revolution, 1741–1794 (1970); Richard D. Brown, Revolutionary Politics in Massachusetts (1970); and Ronald Hoffman, A Spirit of Dissension: Economics, Politics, and the Revolution in Maryland (1973). For studies of some of the leading Revolutionaries and Founders, see John C. Miller, Sam Adams (1936); Richard R. Beeman, Patrick Henry (1974); Merrill Peterson, Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation (1970); Joseph Ellis, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (1997); Ellis, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (2001); Carl Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin (1938); Eric Foner, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (1976); Richard Brookhiser, Alexander Hamilton: American (1999); C. Bradley Thompson, John Adams and the Spirit of Liberty (1998); David McCullough, John Adams (2001); Marcus Cunliffe, George Washington: Man and Monument (1958); James Thomas Flexner, Washington: The Indispensable Man (1974); and Garry Wills, Cincinnatus: George Washington and the Enlightenment (1984).
Modern interest in the ideas of the Revolution dates back to the 1920s and ’30s with the studies of constitutional law and natural rights philosophy by Carl Becker, The Declaration of Independence (1922), and Charles H. McIlwain, The American Revolution: A Constitutional Interpretation (1923), among others. While these books emphasized formal political theory, others explicitly treated the ideas as propaganda. See Philip Davidson, Propaganda and the American Revolution, 1763–1783 (1941), and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Prelude to Independence: The Newspaper War on Britain, 1764–1776 (1958).
In the 1950s serious attention was paid to the determinative influence of ideas in Clinton Rossiter, Seedtime of the Republic (1953), and especially in Edmund S. Morgan and Helen M. Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis (1953), which focused on the issue of parliamentary sovereignty. Only in the 1960s, however, with Bernard Bailyn’s Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967) did historians perceive the Revolutionary ideas as ideology—that is, as a configuration of ideas giving meaning and force to events—and begin to recover the cultural distinctiveness of the late-eighteenth-century world. Bailyn’s book was based in part on the rediscovery of the radical Whig tradition by Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthmen (1959). J. R. Pole, Political Representation in England and the Origin of the American Republic (1966); Trevor H. Colbourn, The Lamp of Experience: Whig History and the Beginnings of the American Revolution (1965); and Isaac F. Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle(1968), have further contributed to an understanding of the sources of the Revolutionary tradition. For detailed analyses of the Americans’ legal positions in the imperial debate see the many books of John Phillip Reid. Jack P. Greene, Peripheries and Center (1986) sets the constitutional issues of federalism in perspective.
The loyalist reaction is analyzed in William H. Nelson, The American Tory (1961); Robert M. Calhoon, The Loyalists in Revolutionary America, 1760–1781 (1973); and Bernard Bailyn, The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (1974). A vitriolic account by a loyalist of the causes of the Revolution is Peter Oliver, Origin and Progress of the American Rebellion, ed. Douglass Adair and John A. Schutz (1961).
On the military actions of the Revolutionary War, the best brief account is Willard M. Wallace, Appeal to Arms (1951). Don Higginbotham, The War of American Independence (1971), and John Shy, A People Numerous and Armed: Reflections on the Military Struggle for American Independence (1976), best appreciate the unconventional and often guerrilla character of the war. The fullest account of British strategy is Piers Mackesy, The War for America, 1775–1783 (1964). On the British commanders in chief, see Ira Gruber, The Howe Brothers and the American Revolution (1972), and William Willcox, Portrait of a General: Sir Henry Clinton in the War of Independence (1964). Paul H. Smith, Loyalists and Redcoats (1964), describes British attempts to mobilize the loyalists. A particularly imaginative study is Charles Royster, A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and American Character, 1775–1783 (1979). On the Americans’ difficulties in the war, see two important works by Richard Buel, Jr., Dear Liberty: Connecticut’s Mobilization for the Revolutionary War (1980) and In Irons: Britain’s Naval Supremacy and the American Revolutionary Economy (1998).
On the diplomacy of the Revolution the older standard account is Samuel Flagg Bemis, The Diplomacy of the American Revolution (1935). See also William C. Stinchcombe, The American Revolution and the French Alliance (1969), and Jonathan Dull, A Diplomatic History of the American Revolution (1985). Richard B. Morris, The Peacemakers (1965), is a full study of the peace negotiations. For a discussion of the Model Treaty and the Americans’ new attitude toward diplomacy, see Felix Gilbert, To the Farewell Address (1961).
For a summary of the history-writing covering the eighteenth-century tradition of republicanism, see Robert E. Shalhope, “Toward a Republican Synthesis: The Emergence of an Understanding of Republicanism in American Historiography,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 29 (1972). Studies emphasizing the peculiar character of this tradition include J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (1975); Franco Venturi, Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment (1971); Gerald Stourzh, Alexander Hamilton and the Idea of Republican Government (1970); and Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (1969). Garry Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (1978), stresses the importance of Scottish moral sense philosophy and the natural sociability of people in Jefferson’s thought. But see also Andrew Brustein, Sentimental Democracy: The Evolution of America’s Romantic Self-Image (1999). Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (1997), emphasizes the contributions of the Congress and other Americans to the Declaration. On the origins of the Americans’ conception of the individual’s relationship to the state, see James H. Kettner, The Development of American Citizenship, 1608–1870 (1978). For the influence of antiquity, see Carl J. Richard, The Founders and the Classics (1994).
The fullest account of state constitution-making and politics is Allan Nevins, The American States During and After the Revolution, 1775–1789 (1924). Among the most significant of the state studies are Philip A. Crowl, Maryland During and After the Revolution (1943); Jean B. Lee, The Price of Nationhood: The American Revolution in Charles County [Md.] (1994); Richard P. McCormick, Experiment in Independence: New Jersey in the Critical Period, 1781–1789 (1950); Irwin H. Polishook, Rhode Island and the Union, 1774–1795 (1969); Robert J. Taylor, Western Massachusetts in the Revolution (1954); and Alfred F. Young, The Democratic Republicans of New York: The Origins, 1763–1797 (1967). Merrill Jensen, in The Articles of Confederation . . . 1774–1781 (1940) stresses the achievements of the Articles. The best history of the Continental Congress is Jack N. Rakove, The Beginnings of National Politics (1979).
The starting point for appreciating the social changes of the Revolution is the short essay by J. Franklin Jameson, The American Revolution Considered as a Social Movement (1926). For modern appraisals, see Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert, eds., The Transforming Hand of Revolution (1995). J. Kirby Martin, Men in Rebellion: Higher Government Leaders and the Coming of the American Revolution (1973); Jackson T. Main, The Upper House in Revolutionary America, 1763–1788 (1967); and Main, “Government by the People: The American Revolution and the Democratization of the Legislatures,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 28 (1966), document the displacement of elites in politics during the Revolution. Chilton Williamson, American Suffrage from Property to Democracy, 1760–1860 (1960), describes the expansion of voting rights. A neat account of Concord, Massachusetts, in the Revolution is Robert A. Gross, The Minutemen and Their World (1976).
A helpful survey of American social history is Rowland Berthoff, An Unsettled People (1971). But it has not replaced the encyclopedic History of American Life Series edited by Arthur M. Schlesinger and Dixon Ryan Fox. The volume covering the Revolutionary era is Evarts B. Greene, The Revolutionary Generation, 1763–1790 (1943). Population developments are summarized by J. Potter, “The Growth of Population in America, 1700–1860,” in David Glass and D. E. Eversley, eds., Population in History (1965).
For economic developments, see the appropriate chapters in John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, The Economy of British America, 1607–1789 (1985). On the commercial effects of the Revolution, see Curtis P. Nettles, The Emergence of a National Economy, 1775–1815 (1962); Robert A. East, Business Enterprise in the American Revolutionary Era (1938); Thomas M. Doerflinger, A Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise: Merchants and Economic Development in Revolutionary Philadelphia (1986); John J. McCusker et al., eds., The Economy of Early America: The Revolutionary Period, 1763–1790 (1988); and Cathy Matson and Peter S. Onuf, A Union of Interests (1989).
On the plight of the loyalists, see Wallace Brown, The Good Americans (1969), and Mary Beth Norton, The British-Americans: The Loyalist Exiles in England, 1774–1789 (1972). On the Indians, see Colin G. Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country (1995); and Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (1991).
On the Enlightenment, see Henry May, The Enlightenment in America (1976), and Robert A. Ferguson, The American Enlightenment, 1750–1820 (1994). The standard survey is Russell B. Nye, The Cultural Life of the New Nation, 1776–1830 (1960). See also Kenneth Silverman, A Cultural History of the American Revolution (1976), and Joseph J. Ellis, After the Revolution: Profiles of Early American Culture (1979). On Freemasonry, see the superb book by Steven C. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood . . . 1730–1840 (1996). A particularly important study of education is Carl F. Kaestle, The Evolution of an Urban School System (1973). On the forming of American nationhood, see David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes . . . 1776–1820 (1997). Ruth H. Bloch, Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought, 1756–1800 (1985), and Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of Christianity (1989) illuminate the millennial and popular evangelical movements in the Revolution.
On women, see Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800 (1980); Linda Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (1980); and Rosalie Zagarri, A Woman’s Dilemma: Mercy Otis Warren and the American Revolution (1995). Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution (1961), and Sylvia Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (1991) are the best studies of the contribution of blacks to the Revolution. On slavery and opposition to it, see Philip Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (1998); Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone (1998); Winthrop Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (1968); and David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (1975). On the abolition of slavery in the North, see Arthur Zilversmit, The First Emancipation(1967).
John Fiske, The Critical Period of American History (1888), popularized the Federalist view of the Confederation for the nineteenth century. Merrill Jensen, The New Nation (1950), minimizes the crisis of the 1780s and explains the movement for the Constitution as the work of a small but dynamic minority. Clarence L. Ver Steeg, Robert Morris, Revolutionary Financier (1954), is the major study of that important figure.
Forrest McDonald, E Pluribus Unum: The Formation of the American Republic, 1776–1790 (1965), describes the commercial scrambling by the Americans in the 1780s. The best account of the army and the Newburgh Conspiracy is Richard H. Kohn, Eagle and Sword: The Federalists and the Creation of the Military Establishment in America, 1783–1802 (1975). Frederick W. Marks III, Independence on Trial (1973), analyzes the foreign problems contributing to the making of the Constitution. The best short survey of the Confederation period is still Andrew C. McLaughlin, The Confederation and the Constitution, 1783–1789 (1905). But see also Richard B. Morris, The Forging of the Union, 1781–1789 (1987), and Merrill Jensen, The New Nation (1950).
Charles Beard’s book An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (1913) sought to explain the Constitution as something other than the consequence of high-minded idealism. It became the most influential history book ever written in America. Beard saw the struggle over the Constitution as a “deep-seated conflict between a popular party based on paper money and agrarian interests and a conservative party centered in the towns and resting on financial, mercantile, and personal property interests generally.” While Beard’s particular proof for his thesis—that the Founders held federal securities that they expected would appreciate in value under a new national government—has been demolished, especially by Forrest McDonald, We the People (1958), his general interpretation of the origins of the Constitution still casts a long shadow. Jackson T. Main, Political Parties Before the Constitution (1974), finds a “cosmopolitan”-“localist” split within the states over the Constitution. Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (1969), working through the ideas, discovers a similar social, but not strictly speaking a “class,” division over the Constitution.
The best history of the Convention is still Max Farrand, The Framing of the Constitution of the United States (1913), which sees the Constitution as “a bundle of compromises” designed to meet specific defects of the Articles. For a brief authoritative biography of the “father of the Constitution,” see Jack N. Rakove, James Madison and the Creation of the American Republic (1991). Rakove’s book Original Meanings (1996) is crucial for anyone interested in what the Constitution meant to the Founders.
Max Farrand, ed., The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787 (4 vols., 1911, 1937); and Merrill Jensen et al., eds., The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution (1976–) are collections of the important documents. Jacob Cooke, ed., The Federalist (1961), is the best edition of these papers. Sympathetic studies of the Anti-Federalists are Jackson T. Main, The Antifederalists . . . 1781–1788 (1961), and Saul Cornell, The Other Founders: Anti-Federalism and the Dissenting Tradition in America, 1788–1828 (1999). See also Robert A. Rutland, The Birth of the Bill of Rights, 1776–1791 (1955). The papers of the Founders—Jefferson, Franklin, Hamilton, John Adams, Madison, Washington, and others—are already published or are currently being published in mammoth scholarly editions.