Amazon.co.uk Review
Ray Raphael's
The American Revolution: A People's History achieves a makeover simply and effectively for the new millennium. Who were the real victors of the American revolution, or the "American War of Independence" as the British still call it. Each new generation of Americans gives a slightly different answer to this question. Indeed, America's image of itself as an integrated and plural society rests partly on its ability to modernise its version of this formative moment in the nation's history. Raphael uses a collection of stories, eye-witness accounts, reminiscences and biographies, to turn what might be seen as essentially a squabble between bad-tempered and over-zealous Englishmen into a people's war, in which the victors and the vanquished were the ordinary folk of colonial America. Raphael's previous books used oral history sources and he applies a similar sort of method here. He has sought out the voices of a rainbow alliance of people--women, slaves and freedmen, teenage recruits, native American tribes, and embittered loyalists--and the tales of primitive "tar-and-feather" justice, daring heroism and staunch principle that these voices tell amount to a good, entertaining read. Whether they add up to a different interpretation of the American revolution is a moot point. The author's own view seems to have changed by the time he reached his rather downbeat conclusion. But for a compendium of some of the best research into the social history of the American revolution produced by scholars over the last 25 years this is a good place to begin. --
Miles Taylor
Product Description
Telling the history of the American Revolution from the often-overlooked standpoint of its everyday participants, this is an involving narrative of the wartime experience designed to convey the best of modern scholarship to a general reading audience. Our understanding of the origins and consequences of the American war with Britain has now been greatly expanded by examining previously marginalized stories, those of the common people, slave and free who made up the majority of pre-revolutionary America. A broad array of diaries and other first person accounts are woven into the narrative. The focus moves on from leaders like Washington and Jefferson to the slaves they owned, the Indians they displaced, the men and boys who did the fighting and the women who endured it.
