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This volume brings together the seminal essays of John M. Murrin on the American Revolution, the United States Constitution, and the early American Republic. Rethinking America explains why a constitutional argument within the British Empire escalated to produce a revolutionary republic.
List of contents
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- Introduction: The Revolutionary Republic of a Radical, Imperial, Whig: The Historical and Historiographical Imagination of John M. Murrin- Andrew Shankman
- Part I: An Overview
- Chapter 1: The Great Inversion, or, Court versus Country: A Comparison of the Revolution Settlements in England (1688-1721) and America (1776-1816)
- Part II: Toward Revolution
- Chapter 2: No Awakening, No Revolution? More Counterfactual Speculations
- Chapter 3: The French and Indian War, the American Revolution, and the Counterfactual Hypothesis: Reflections on Lawrence Henry Gipson and John Shy
- Chapter 4: Feudalism, Communalism, and the Yeoman Freeholder: The American Revolution Considered as a Social Accident (with Rowland Berthoff)
- Chapter 5: 1776: The Countercyclical Revolution
- Part III: Defining the Republic
- Chapter 6: A Roof Without Walls: The Dilemma of American National Identity
- Chapter 7: Fundamental Values, the Founding Fathers, and the Constitution
- Chapter 8: The Making and Unmaking of an American Ruling Class (with Gary J. Kornblith)
- Chapter 9: Escaping Perfidious Albion: Federalism, Fear of Aristocracy, and the Democratization of Corruption in Postrevolutionary America
- Chapter 10: War, Revolution, and Nation-Making: The American Revolution versus the Civil War
- Conclusion: Self-Immolation: Schools of Historiography and the Coming of the American Revolution
About the author
John Murrin is one of the foremost scholars of early America and is the author of over 50 essays and the textbook Liberty, Equality, Power. He is a former President of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic and was for over 30 years a professor of history at Princeton University.
Andrew Shankman, Associate Professor at Rutgers University-Camden, is the author of Original Intents: Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, and the American Founding and Crucible of American Democracy: The Struggle to Fuse Egalitarianism in Jeffersonian Pennsylvania, and the editor of The World of the Revolutionary American Republic: Land, Labor, and the Conflict for a Continent and Anglicizing America: Empire, Revolution, Republic.
Summary
This volume brings together the seminal essays of John M. Murrin on the American Revolution, the United States Constitution, and the early American Republic. Rethinking America explains why a constitutional argument within the British Empire escalated to produce a revolutionary republic.
Additional text
Rethinking America reminds us of the power wielded by historians and their studies. It and Murrin both offer a compelling explanation for the transformative power of the American Revolution and suggests why it places so prominently in scholarship, political maneuvering, and in the public imagination. Rethinking America deserves significant praise and further critical attention in light of new developments in the field of early American history. At its core, the ten essays collected in Rethinking America explore how British North American colonists turned-citizens of a Republic developed ideas of how to act as British and American citizens. By virtue of its publication, this book asks historians to seriously consider Murrin's place in the pantheon of great historians yet still to test the endurance of his numerous insights.
