The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America by Gary B. Nash
The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America by Gary B. Nash
"Can America be happy?" asked America's apostle of radicalism, reviewing the colonial landscape in 1776. "As happy as she please" was Tom Paine's own answer. "She hath a blank sheet to write upon." Paine's memorable statement, penned at a low point in the longest and most disruptive upheaval in our history, provides the thematic spine to this robust exploration of the blaze of radical ideas and agendas that fired the American Revolution.
The Founding Fathers may have led the charge, but the energy to raise a revolt emerged from all classes and races of American society. The Unknown American Revolution plunges us into the swirl of ideology, grievance, outrage, and hope that animated the Revolutionary decades. It tells of the efforts of a wide variety of men and women who stepped forward amidst a discouraging, debilitating, but ultimately successful, war to inscribe on the clean slate their ideas for the kind of America they hoped would emerge from the blood-soaked eight-year conflict. Millennialist preachers and enslaved Africans, frontier mystics and dockside tars, disgruntled women, and aggrieved Indians -- all had their own fierce vision of what an independent America could and should be. According to Nash, the American Revolution was truly a people's revolution, a civil war at home as well as an armed insurrection against colonial control.
The goal was to set a new course for the new country, one free of entrenched class hostilities, religious bigotry, racism, and conventions about gender roles. The people so vividly portrayed in this book did not all agree or succeed, but during the exhilarating and messy years of this country's birth, they laid down ideas that have become part of our inheritance and ideals toward which we still strive today.
Viking, Hardcover, Book Club Edition, 2005
THIS IS A USED BOOK IN LIKE NEW CONDITION. THE DUST WRAPPER IS ALSO IN LIKE NEW CONDITION.