Major Problems in the Era of the American Revolution, 1760-1791 (Major Problems in American History) (Major Problems in American History (Wadsworth)) [Paperback]

Books in the "Major Problems in American History" series are designed as college textbooks, but also offer much to the general reader who wishes to understand more thoroughly a given time period in American history.

This entry on the American Revolution is no exception. The original source documents and essays in the book examine the meaning of the Revolution and how truly radical the Revolution was, in that all men were not considered as being created equal prior to the eighteenth century.

Fans of military history may be disappointed, as there is only one chapter on the Revolutionary War. The book concentrates instead on social, cultural, and economic trends that led to our separation from Britain, and also takes a look at how the Revolution changed gender and racial relations. Political theory is also heavily covered, as the book plumbs the failure of the Articles of Confederation and the adoption of the Constitution and Bill of Rights.

Those who wish to delve deeply into the story of our nation's founding would be rewarded by reading the material in this book.

I had this book inflicted on me as required reading for a college class on the American Revolution. Having had to read it, I would not recommend it to anyone who is looking to further their understanding of the American Revolution-- there have to be better reference books and collections of primary source material out there.

First: there are a *few* good points. Professor Brown seems to have made a selection of roughly 6 primary source documents for each of his 13 chapters, and while I'm sure you can find them elsewhere, it may be nice for some people to have them collected in one book. He has also selected 2 essays by other historians for each chapter, plus 3 essays for the introduction and 3 more for the conclusion. The essays are written by reputable historians, and from what can still be discerned from the original historian's arguments, these historians seem to be capable writers who can evaluate the evidence and construct good arguments. Each of these essays, if included in its entirety, would have been an excellent choice for students in an American history class concentrating on the Revolution. If Professor Brown had deigned to leave the essays and primary source documents intact, this would be an excellent book.

Which leads me to the problem with Professor Brown's work, and why I've given this book a '1 star' rating. Professor Brown has an excessively heavy hand at editing the works of other historians, and he has horribly butchered, mutilated, and destroyed every historian's essay he has included in this book. Over and over again, when reading essays in this book, one trips over those little ellipses (that's the three little periods, like '...', that indicate where an editor has removed material from the original work-- to clarify for those who didn't already know that). Sometimes it's hard to tell whether Brown merely cut out a few words, or cut out sentences, or cut out several paragraphs, or even removed a few pages. What is clear is that the original historian's thoughts usually take a jarring, disjointed turn from one side of the ellipses to the other, indicating that Brown has cut out much of the original author's discussion, intent, evidence and conclusions, and then usually tried to jam what remains of entirely separated portions of the essay back into some sort of connection. Brown does this extremely poorly. He has murdered the arguments in each of these essays, then stitched them back together and reanimated them as some sort of being (like Frankenstein's monster) whose argument has been remade in the image that Brown wants it to have, but that no longer clearly communicates the original author's thought. Countless times as I read through this book, I had to consider just what it was that Brown left out, and what the original author's real thrust to their argument might have been before Brown destroyed it.

In one case, I was able to compare the original essay by one of the authors with what was left in Brown's extremely over-edited work, and I found that Brown had chopped the essay in half and taken out much of the original argument's force and impact. His version had caused readers to be left with a significantly different, overly simplified impression of the issues in question, and also would lead the student to believe that the issues discussed were both much more clear-cut with a unified view of them by all the colonists, and much less important in determining the colonist's path to resistance. When Brown's destruction of one essay was so thorough, and the remaining pieces of others makes it clear that he did that sort of work to every essay in this book, I cannot trust the conclusions I was doubtless (as a student) supposed to be drawing from any of the parts of Brown's hack-job. The essay I was able to compare with the original writing was Pauline Maier's "The Townshend Acts and the Consolidation of Colonial Resistance". The original is chapter 5 of Pauline Maier's own book, 'From Resistance to Revolution' (had to read it for the same class-- Professor Maier's book is a much better example of historical writing than anything I've seen from Professor Brown).

As an academic source, this book ought to be considered worthless. One cannot, in good conscience, quote anything from this book: it would be the same as, in history or any other field, taking someone's quote out of context and seeking to make it support something that it probably doesn't. I am highly unlikely, after seeing Brown's sense of respect for other historical thinkers (he apparently has none) and his sense of restraint in preserving knowledge (he would apparently rather destroy anything that doesn't fit his preconceived goals for his book), to buy and read any book by Richard D. Brown voluntarily. If this book is a clear example of the rest of the work Richard D. Brown has done as an academic writer and professor of history, he ought to be figuratively burned at the academic stake (maybe even literally burned in effigy) and never be taken seriously as a historian again.

Dr. Richard Brown, editor of this book, was my professor at the University of Connecticut, and so I need to say something here. Major Problems is a great book because it is full of historical documents and complex essays that strive to understand the revolution's origins, the revolution itself, and the aftermath. This is not a layman's book: Jefferson, Paine, Adams et al. are represented here by their own writings, and their thinking dwarfs most of us living today. Supporting essays by contemporary historians and political scientists add depth to the already deep well of political thought of eighteenth-century America. Huzza to the Revolution! Huzza!