Before the Revolution

Before the Revolution
Author: Daniel K. Richter
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 555
Release: 2013-05-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674072367

America began, we are often told, with the Founding Fathers, the men who waged a revolution and created a unique place called the United States. We may acknowledge the early Jamestown and Puritan colonists and mourn the dispossession of Native Americans, but we rarely grapple with the complexity of the nation's pre-revolutionary past. In this pathbreaking revision, Daniel Richter shows that the United States has a much deeper history than is apparentÑthat far from beginning with a clean slate, it is a nation with multiple pasts that stretch back as far as the Middle Ages, pasts whose legacies continue to shape the present. Exploring a vast range of original sources, Before the Revolution spans more than seven centuries and ranges across North America, Europe, and Africa. Richter recovers the lives of a stunning array of peoplesÑIndians, Spaniards, French, Dutch, Africans, EnglishÑas they struggled with one another and with their own people for control of land and resources. Their struggles occurred in a global context and built upon the remains of what came before. Gradually and unpredictably, distinctive patterns of North American culture took shape on a continent where no one yet imagined there would be nations called the United States, Canada, or Mexico. By seeing these trajectories on their own dynamic terms, rather than merely as a prelude to independence, Richter's epic vision reveals the deepest origins of American history.

Becoming America

Becoming America
Author: Jon Butler
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2001-12-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674006674

Multinational, profit-driven, materialistic, politically self-conscious, power-hungry, religiously plural: America three hundred years ago -- and today. Here are Britain's mainland American colonies after 1680, in the process of becoming the first modern society -- a society the earliest colonists never imagined, a "new order of the ages" that anticipated the American Revolution. Jon Butler's panoramic view of the colonies in this epoch transforms our customary picture of prerevolutionary America; it reveals a strikingly "modern" character that belies the eighteenth-century quaintness fixed in history. Stressing the middle and late decades (the hitherto "dark ages") of the American colonial experience, and emphasizing the importance of the middle and southern colonies as well as New England, Becoming America shows us transformations before 1776 among an unusually diverse assortment of peoples. Here is a polyglot population of English, Indians, Africans, Scots, Germans, Swiss, Swedes, and French; a society of small colonial cities with enormous urban complexities; an economy of prosperous farmers thrust into international market economies; peoples of immense wealth, a burgeoning middle class, and incredible poverty. Butler depicts settlers pursuing sophisticated provincial politics that ultimately sparked revolution and a new nation; developing new patterns in production, consumption, crafts, and trades that remade commerce at home and abroad; and fashioning a society remarkably pluralistic in religion, whose tolerance nonetheless did not extend to Africans or Indians. Here was a society that turned protest into revolution and remade itself many times during the next centuries -- asociety that, for ninety years before 1776, was becoming America.

The Revolution Before the Revolution

The Revolution Before the Revolution
Author: Guya Accornero
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 169
Release: 2016
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781785331145

Title Page -- Table of Contents -- List of Figures -- Acknowledgments -- List of Abbreviations -- Introduction -- Chapter 1. Two Decades That Shook the World: 1956-1974 -- Chapter 2. The First Protest Cycle: 1956-1965 -- Chapter 3. 'The Marcelo's Spring' and the Opening of a Second Protest Cycle -- Chapter 4. Protest Cycle or Permanent Conflict? -- Chapter 5. The Demise of the New State -- Conclusions. Social Movements and Authoritarianism -- Bibliography -- Index

France Before the Revolution

France Before the Revolution
Author: J. H. Shennan
Publisher: Psychology Press
Total Pages: 70
Release: 1995
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 9780415119450

Covers the period between Louis XIV's death in 1715 and the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789

1774

1774
Author: Mary Beth Norton
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 530
Release: 2021-02-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 0804172463

From one of our most acclaimed and original colonial historians, a groundbreaking book tracing the critical "long year" of 1774 and the revolutionary change that took place from the Boston Tea Party and the First Continental Congress to the Battles of Lexington and Concord. A WALL STREET JOURNAL BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR In this masterly work of history, the culmination of more than four decades of research and thought, Mary Beth Norton looks at the sixteen months leading up to the clashes at Lexington and Concord in mid-April 1775. This was the critical, and often overlooked, period when colonists traditionally loyal to King George III began their discordant “discussions” that led them to their acceptance of the inevitability of war against the British Empire. Drawing extensively on pamphlets, newspapers, and personal correspondence, Norton reconstructs colonial political discourse as it took place throughout 1774. Late in the year, conservatives mounted a vigorous campaign criticizing the First Continental Congress. But by then it was too late. In early 1775, colonial governors informed officials in London that they were unable to thwart the increasing power of local committees and their allied provincial congresses. Although the Declaration of Independence would not be formally adopted until July 1776, Americans had in effect “declared independence ” even before the outbreak of war in April 1775 by obeying the decrees of the provincial governments they had elected rather than colonial officials appointed by the king. Norton captures the tension and drama of this pivotal year and foundational moment in American history and brings it to life as no other historian has done before.

Before the Revolution

Before the Revolution
Author: Vĩnh Long Ngô
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 324
Release: 1991
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780231076791

During the French colonial period (1900-1945), Vietnamese peasants wrote vigorously about the effects of French policies on their living conditions. The vast majority of their writings were censored or contradicted by the published works of French and Vietnamese officials, and none is currenty in print. Ngo Vinh Long presents a realistic portrait of the Vietnamese determination and resiliency that brought down both the French and the American regimes. He describes the effects of French land policy on the peasants and the resulting problems in tenant farming and sharecropping, as well as peasant reaction to taxes, tax collections, usury, government agarian credit programs, commerce, and industry. He also translates previously unavailable texts that detail the emotions of the Vietnamese people with regard to the French occupation. For the Morningside Edition, Dr. Long has written a new preface in which he describes new scholarship and changes during the last fifteen years.

The First American Revolution

The First American Revolution
Author: Ray Raphael
Publisher:
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2002
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781565847309

In an eye-opening look at the history of America's revolutionary struggle, the author of A People's History of the American Revolution describes how, in the years prior to the Battle of Lexington and Concord, local people took the British authority to declare themselves free from colonial oppression. 10,000 first printing.

Inheriting the Revolution

Inheriting the Revolution
Author: Joyce Appleby
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2001-09-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674006631

Details the experiences of the first generation of Americans who inherited the independent country, discussing the lives, businesses, and religious freedoms that transformed the country in its early years.

The Counter-Revolution of 1776

The Counter-Revolution of 1776
Author: Gerald Horne
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 393
Release: 2014-04-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 1479808725

Illuminates how the preservation of slavery was a motivating factor for the Revolutionary War The successful 1776 revolt against British rule in North America has been hailed almost universally as a great step forward for humanity. But the Africans then living in the colonies overwhelmingly sided with the British. In this trailblazing book, Gerald Horne shows that in the prelude to 1776, the abolition of slavery seemed all but inevitable in London, delighting Africans as much as it outraged slaveholders, and sparking the colonial revolt. Prior to 1776, anti-slavery sentiments were deepening throughout Britain and in the Caribbean, rebellious Africans were in revolt. For European colonists in America, the major threat to their security was a foreign invasion combined with an insurrection of the enslaved. It was a real and threatening possibility that London would impose abolition throughout the colonies—a possibility the founding fathers feared would bring slave rebellions to their shores. To forestall it, they went to war. The so-called Revolutionary War, Horne writes, was in part a counter-revolution, a conservative movement that the founding fathers fought in order to preserve their right to enslave others. The Counter-Revolution of 1776 brings us to a radical new understanding of the traditional heroic creation myth of the United States.