The three-volume Cambridge History of the American Revolution, edited Marjoleine Kars, Michael A. McDonnell, Andrew M. Schocket, was published online on February 3 and has a print publication date of October 30.
Volume 1: Revolutionary Contexts
Volume 2: RevolutionThe first volume delves into how the context of the American Revolution was set, taking readers across North America and the world to reveal the far-flung people, events, institutions, cultures, and ideas that led to its inception. Through a global lens, the volume shows how empires struggled with political and economic reforms, as well as popular protest, while competing and warring with each other. On a continental scale, long-term environmental and economic structures, native peoples, colonial settlers, and their interactions set the parameters for revolutionary conflict. Focusing on the thirteen colonies, -particularly groups who are traditionally overlooked- the essays shed light on the specific milieus in which the Revolution took place, examining and reinterpreting the iconic events leading up to independence and war. A mixture of broad topical essays and short innovative “viewpoints”, together the essays question notions of American exceptionalism while emphasizing both change and continuity.
The second volume focuses on the years of upheaval during the American Revolution between 1775 and 1789. It breaks new ground by surveying a wide range of internal conflicts in the thirteen colonies, the trauma of a bloody war and its consequences, as well as the continental, hemispheric, and global forces shaping warfare and politics in this era. Together, the essays expand our understanding of how various people navigated military occupation, community conflict, governmental paralysis, interpersonal relationships, institutional collapse, and the slipperiness of allegiances. Through sweeping interpretative essays and micro-history viewpoints, the volume highlights the interplay of class, race, and gender in a wartime context and how these dynamics played out and were influenced by broader geopolitical developments. The depths of division and grand possibilities are explored – and interrupt our long-standing notions of traditional linear narratives of nation-making in this era.Volume 3: Continuities, Changes, and Legacies
The third and final volume examines the American Revolution and its consequences, continuities, and legacies. Across thirty essays, ranging from broad, topical chapters to innovative, shorter 'viewpoints', the volume sheds light on how the American Revolution reverberated worldwide from the Constitution's ratification to twenty-first century cultural battles over the Revolution's meanings. Americans of all stripes adapted old rituals and structures to national independence, new rights, and republican politics, while enslaved and Indigenous peoples contended with the nation's intensification of the exploitation of humans and land. The Revolution's global shockwaves buffeted empires and the people who resisted them. From the eighteenth century to today, Americans and people across the world have contested how we remember the American Revolution.Richard J. Ross, University of Illinois, and Steven Wilf, University of Connecticut School of Law, have posted their contribution to volume 1, Legal Orders:
This chapter explores how the Patriots deployed law in order to mobilize fellow citizens towards rebellion. In the decade before the Revolution, Patriots fashioned law in innovative ways as a language that could cross geographical and social borders in order to rally citizens to a cause. What made their appeals effective? First, the chapter asks how the settlers’ growing competence in formulating constitutional argument favored the Whigs. Second, a look at early nineteenth-century Spanish American independence movements helps explain how and why the Whigs could plausibly believe one of their core ideas—that a colony was a polity representing the rights of an underlying people. Finally, attention to the vernacular legal culture of the streets and taverns shows how Patriot legal appeals could be appropriated by ordinary people. The remarkable capacity of Whig law to bridge social and geographical distances helped make it a powerful instrument of revolutionary mobilization.
--Dan Ernst
