The Freedoms We Lost: Consent and Resistance in Revolutionary America by Barbara Clark Smith
The Freedoms We Lost: Consent and Resistance in Revolutionary America by Barbara Clark Smith
The American Revolution is widely understood -- by school children and citizens alike -- as having ushered in "freedom" as we know it, a freedom that places voting at the center of American democracy. In a sharp break from this view, historian Barbara Clark Smith charts the largely unknown territory of the unique freedoms enjoyed by colonial American subjects of the British king -- that is, American freedom before the Revolution. The Freedoms We Lost recovers a world of common men regularly serving on juries, joining crowds that enforced (or opposed) government edicts, and bringing popular ideals of fairness to the enforcement of laws.
The Freedoms We Lost shows that American patriots relied on colonial-era traditions of political participation and popular values to drive the Revolution forward -- a Revolution that eventually betrayed those values as leading patriots gravitated toward "monied men" and elites who would limit the role of common men in the new democracy. By the end of the 1780s, she shows, Americans discovered that forms of participation once proper to subjects of Britain were inappropriate -- even impermissible -- to citizens of the United States.
In a narrative that counters nearly every textbook account of America's founding, era, The Freedoms We Lost challenges our understanding of our own history and causes us to rethink what it means to be free.
The New Press, Hardcover, Book Club Edition, 2010
THIS IS A USED BOOK IN LIKE NEW CONDITION. THE DUST WRAPPER IS ALSO IN LIKE NEW CONDITION.