A People's Revolution? Towards a New History of the Revolutionary Era

Abstract

As Ray Raphael so vividly reminds us, the American War of Independence was one of the costliest, bloodiest conflicts in American history. Few Americans today, reared on films and documentary accounts of World War II and the conflict in Vietnam, know that only during the Civil War did a greater percentage of the population perish in any one conflict. As John Shy has calculated, the twenty-five thousand service-related deaths alone in the eightyear-long war is the per capita equivalent of about two million deaths in the United States today. Two million.' Moreover, on an unprecedented scale, hundreds of thousands of men and women, black, white and Native American, were dragged into a war, most often not of their making, and forced to choose sides, act, and suffer usually miserable consequences. The outcome of the Revolutionary War, of course, has always overshadowed the event itself. Indeed, beginning with the Founding Fathers themselves, most notably Charles Thomson, the secretary of Congress, Americans have too often whitewashed the true nature of the conflict. Yet judged from the perspective of thousands of ordinary Americans, we can only conclude that the Revolutionary War was nothing less than a divisive, damaging, and confusing civil war. Was it also a transforming experience? As his title suggests, Raphael's book is an attempt to retell the stories of the many and varied people who got caught up in the Revolutionary War. With considerable passion, Raphael aims to put an end to the sanitized versions of the Revolution that have prevailed in the public mind. Published by The New Press, a not-for-profit press established in 1992 to disseminate ideas and