When, Mary Beth Norton asks, did the American Revolution begin? The question is surprising, largely because the answer seems to have been settled long ago—by people who actually participated in it. The revolutionary story that most of us learned at school usually starts in 1760, with the coronation of George III. The colonists loved him. They expected him to defend the British constitution, champion Protestantism, and promote commercial prosperity throughout the empire.
But then, according to this familiar narrative, everything slowly turned sour, and within a few years the new monarch and his supporters in Parliament managed to alienate Americans who pledged their undying loyalty to Great Britain while at the same time protesting, often by rioting in port cities, the notion that a legislature in which they had no representation could force them to pay taxes. A revolutionary spirit gradually gathered momentum throughout America. Angry colonists opposed the Stamp Act (1765), the Townshend duties (1768), and the Tea Act (1773), a series of parliamentary statutes that taxed various print materials such as newspapers and popular consumer items imported from Great Britain.
This account of revolution leads almost inevitably to the Battles of Lexington and Concord in 1775. Commentators at the time favored a metaphor of maturation: American adolescents had come of age, announcing in a united voice that they could no longer tolerate British control. The revolutionary seeds planted early in the reign of George III reached their natural and logical fulfillment with the Declaration of Independence.
Norton, a distinguished scholar of early American history, advances a different revolutionary story. For her, it does not make sense to claim that the revolution began almost fifteen years before colonial militiamen fired on British troops at Concord. The revolution, she argues persuasively, started in what she calls the long 1774, which includes parts of 1773 and 1775. By focusing on those months of rapidly accelerating and fundamental political change, she recasts the oft-repeated account of how colonists evolved from loyal subjects of the crown in 1760 to determined revolutionaries in 1776. Norton also helps us understand how difficult it was for many Americans to abandon political beliefs about an ordered monarchical system that they had come to take for granted.