Question 1: What do you consider the most important insight historians have offered about the American Revolution in the decades since the Bicentennial? In other words, if you were in a college course about the American Revolution today, how would it look different than it did in 1976?
T. H. Breen
The interpretation of the American Revolution has changed substantially since the Bicentennial. The development is welcome not only because it brings complexity to complacent narratives of independence, but also because it challenges self-serving stories about the nation's origins that have recently become the source of partisan political claims that have little historical merit. However, the shift in how we now view the Revolution cannot be reduced to a single transformative insight. Rather, I would submit that three separate but complementary trends have dominated a rapidly evolving field. One disclaimer is necessary. It would be misleading to suggest that the lines of inquiry that I discuss come close to exhausting a list of exciting, innovative research appearing on such diverse subjects such as legal, economic, scientific, and imperial history.
The most striking change is the attention to people who have long been left out of the revolutionary story. We have long known—or should have known—that race and racism have had a profound impact on the origins of our political culture. The extraordinary work of Edmund S. Morgan, Ira Berlin, David B. Davis, and Winthrop Jordan forced scholars to give proper attention to discomforting topics that with rare exception—Benjamin Quarles, for example—were ignored.
What is impressive about more recent work is that enslaved people are not treated simply as an abstract mental category, as the object of discrimination and marginalization. We have come to appreciate that they possessed agency. As a result of this insight, researchers increasingly pay attention to complex patterns of interaction, to strategies of resistance and borrowing. Historians such as James Merrell and Richard White demonstrated how Indigenous peoples structured these cultural conversations. No current discussion of the revolutionary period could disregard Colin Calloway's impressive writings. Nor Rosemarie Zagarri's study of women. Much of the new work on women, African Americans, and Indigenous peoples has been woven provocatively by Gary Nash and Woody Holton's splendid surveys that provide inclusive stories of Americans struggling to understand the full meaning of independence.