American Revolution : An Introduction
It was just the decision of the Thirteen Colonies to declare their independence. As after 1763 Britain challenged the traditional autonomy of its colonies by introducting new policies of imperial reform and taxation; the colonies responded, nullifying first those policies and then their tie to Britain itself; at last, they created a republic where an empire had been. However the fact surrounding that story is complex indeed. Though analysts have tried for two full centuries to make sense of it, no single interpretation has ever won general acceptance. Among the earliest interpreters were the Revolution’s participants and victims, for the aftermath of independence saw half-literate farmers, angry politicians, sophisticated intellectuals, and loyalist exiles all writing down their versions of what they had lived through. Yet for all that they had shared in its events, these men and women could not agree on what the Revolution had been. Writers of the time raised in fact every question about the Revolution that academic historians have been arguing about since the writing of American history began. In particular, some contemporaries saw the Revolution as not merely a conflict between America and Britain, but a conflict—and transformation—within America itself (Lynd, 1967).
Several scholars have considered the social, in contrast to intellectual background to the Revolution. Jack P. Greene has written on it in a number of places, but most succinctly in his Harmsworth inaugural lecture at Oxford, All Men are Created Equal: Some Reflections on the Character of the American Resolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976). Richard Hofstadter deals with it in America at 1750: A Social Portrait (New York: Knopf, 1971), as do Jackson Turner Main in The Social Structure of Revolutionary America (1965) (Jensen, 1940; Jensen, 1950; Jensen, 1968), and Kenneth Loekridge in Settlement and Unsettlement in Early America (Cambridge, England: Cambridge UP, 1981)........
