Books & Culture would have required a name change—maybe to The Books & Culture of the American Revolution—if it had tried to provide essays on all the significant or interesting recent books on the War for Independence, its prehistory, and its aftermath. The past two to three years have witnessed a full crop of such works, of which a few can be mentioned here as samples of a luxuriant growth of scholarship and as a supplement to the published essays that appeared in the July/August 2001 issue of Books & Culture.

Pride of place for books treating the years before the Revolution belongs to Fred Anderson, The Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766 (Knopf, 2000, 862 pp., $40). This long, elaborate, deeply researched, but also smoothly written volume makes a solid case for what Americans call "The French and Indian War" being the seedbed for what eventually emerged in the War for Independence as the United States of America. The book, which has been widely and favorably reviewed, is at its best in showing why British victory over the French, with all the over–reaching that victory entailed for Parliament and its ministers, was the indispensable prequel to America's victory over the British.

Another fine study that asks readers to look again at issues once thought to be long–settled is Andrew J. O'Shaughnessy, An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean (Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2000, 392 pp., $44, cloth; $22.50, paper). O'Shaughnessy's reminder that of Britain's 26 colonies in the New World, only 13 walked out, refocuses attention on why the other 13 remained Loyal. The process that led the mainland Southern colonies to join the independence movement, even while the Caribbean colonies that were so similar to those Southern colonies did not, is only one of the many useful tales told by this paradigm–breaking book.

Also out to break paradigms are several recent studies of what might be called the losers in the post–Revolutionary struggle. After the war, a faction led by the familiar founding fathers (Hamilton, Madison, Franklin, Washington, Jefferson) came to the conclusion that the new United States enjoyed too much liberty. Their response was to construct a national Constitution that vested more real power in a national government. Yet these federalizers always had their hands full with the arguments and actions of the anti–federalists who persisted in worrying about the over–abundance of power that the colonists had complained about against the mother country. Couldn't the new federal state under the Constitution build up just as much power with just as evil effects? A book that lays out this anti–federalist logic with considerable force is Saul Cornell, The Other Founders: Anti–Federalism and the Dissenting Tradition in America (Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1999, 352 pp., $55, cloth; $19.95, paper). Two other studies branch off from the concerns of the anti–federalists and to show how the junior partners in the national scheme maintained the strength of localities: Marc W. Kruman, Between Authority and Liberty: State Constitution Making in Revolutionary America (Univ. of North Carolina Press,1999, 238 pp., $39.95, cloth; $17.95, paper); and Forrest McDonald, States' Rights and the Union: Imperium in Imperio, 1776–1876 (Univ. Press of Kansas, 2000, 272 pp., $29.95). Both of these books focus on the relationship between local and national power and how, in the country's early decades, what might be called anti–federalist sentiments remained alive and well in the states, despite the inability of those sentiments to derail the Constitution.

As might be expected in our age of multiplying concerns for justice to the underdog, recent books on the Revolution have also included several studies concerning the era's politically voiceless populations. Woody Holton, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1999, 231 pp., $39.95, cloth; $15.95, paper) attends to the littlest of Revolutionary Virginia's little people. This is a book with an outstanding subject—as illustrated, for example, by the great patriot dudgeon at the effrontery of Virginia's last royal governor promising to free any slave who helped the British put down the revolt—but a volume that probably does not develop the theme of its title as fully as possible.

Quite otherwise is Francis Jennings, The Creation of America: Through Revolution to Empire (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000, 340 pp., $54.95, cloth; $19.95, paper), the last book by a persistent champion of the "other Americans" whom textbooks until recently left out of the story. Jennings was mad as a hornet when he wrote this book, as indicated by his judgment on the Founding Fathers: "The sanctimonious prating by the Revolutionaries that they were virtuous—coming from such political bosses, bootleggers, financial tricksters, and slavers—is too disgusting for detailed discussion here." It must be said that this kind of judgment operates much more from contemporary moral sensibilities than from the mindset of the late–eighteenth century, a point made nicely by Gordon Wood in a New York Review essay (March 29, 2001): "Jennings … joins the ranks of the recent present–minded historians who blame the Founders for failing to transcend the assumptions of their own time and for setting up a system that fails to solve our own current problems." Still, Jennings has a point that, even in its overstated fashion, all who would love liberty truly should ponder at length.

A well–researched and very well written book operating on the other side of the moral universe from Jennings's volume is Joseph J. Ellis, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (Knopf, 2000, 304 pp., $26). The recent revelation of Ellis's fabrications about his service in Vietnam and other matters of personal history casts an odd light on this book, which treats the well–known founders by getting beneath the surface of public duties to their private lives—especially where those lives criss–crossed with each other. Ellis demonstrates how gratifying the old–fashioned kind of top–down history can remain when written by an expert.

The recent crop of books relating more directly to the churches is well sampled in the Books & Culture essays. One more that deserves mention is Nancy L. Rhoden, Revolutionary Anglicanism: The Colonial Church of England Clergy During the American Revolution (New York Univ. Press, 1999, 205 pp., $40). The strength of this study is to show how Episcopalians, with great initial reluctance, came to terms with the denominationalism, the voluntarism and the American patriotism of the new United States—all traits that their Anglican heritage repudiated but that they eventually came to accept as well.

In many ways the most far–ranging recent book treating the aftermath of the War for Independence is Joyce Appleby, Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans (Harvard Univ. Press, 2000, 320 pp., $26.00). This superb study, which is based on personal records from hundreds of mostly ordinary people, tells how newly liberated citizens went about making something of the country they had torn out of the British empire. Appleby's conclusion is that what we often consider the product of the Revolution was actually the cultural construction of the post–Revolutionary generation, mostly in the North. The equation of America with universal ideas of liberty, for example, was much more firmly established by what ordinary people did in taking advantages of new opportunities in the post–Revolutionary era than it was by the War itself. In its breadth and depth, Appleby's study is a worthy bookend to Fred Anderson's magisterial account of the French and Indian War.

For those who might like to try more general books about the American founding era, Harry M. Ward, The War for Independence and the Transformation of American Society (UCL Press, 1999, 310 pp., $65, cloth; $24.95, paper) is good on how the war opened many social possibilities, but also led to greater economic stratification than the colonies had known before. The British–based historian, Francis D. Cogliana, Revolutionary America, 1763-1815: A Political History (Routledge, 2000, 275 pp., $67, cloth; $19.99, paper), is welcome for showing that revolutionary change did not end with the end of the Revolution and also for showing how easily political arguments against Britain became political arguments among the newly independent Americans themselves.

After contemplating so many new books to explore on the many dimensions of the American Revolution, some weary readers might be ready for a movie. Well and good, but please don't make it The Patriot, starring Mel Gibson, a production monumentally misguided in its history. Maybe it could be considered a nice story if regarded simply as another placeless, timeless shoot-'em-up, but if the realm of the factual is anywhere in view, "demented fiction" and "idiotic twaddle" are some of the nicer things that might be said about this effort. For movies with a little bit of history, not too badly fudged, stick to the new Pearl Harbor or Thirteen Days, and then hustle back to the books.

Mark Noll is McManis Professor of Christian Thought at Wheaton College. He is the author most recently of Protestants in America (Oxford Univ. Press) and American Evangelicalism: An Introduction (Blackwell).

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.
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