British Traditions and Revolutionary America

Abstract

John Philip Reid. In Defiance of the Law: The Standing-Army Controversy, Two Constitutions, and the Coming of the American Revolution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981. 239 pp. Peter Shaw. American Patriots and the Rituals of Revolution. Cambridge. Mass.: Harvard University Press. 1981. 231 pp. David P. Szatmary. Shay's Rebellion: The Making of an Agrarian Insurrection. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. 1980. 134 + xiv pp. The wheel has turned practically full circle in American historiography of the revolutionary period. These three interdisciplinary studies follow a recent trend of investigation that concludes that it is no longer acceptable to write of a unique American revolutionary ideology in the 1760s and 1770s. This should come as no surprise to those who have read the work of historians like D. G. Allen and E. B. Tucker.1 If social and religious life in New England could be similar to that of village communities in rural Norfolk during the seven- teenth century, it does not require too great a leap of historical imagination to accept that other aspects of day-to-day existence had undergone little change in crossing the Atlantic. In these three studies it is clear that the singular British attitude to authority of any sort remained deeply etched in the American psyche before, during and, to some extent, after the Revolution. This line of approach has certainly produced a more reasonable interpretation of the colonial break with Britain, putting the required emphasis on how painful it was for most Americans to turn from resistance to rebellion. One drawback common to all three studies, however, is their concentration on Massachusetts in general and Boston in particular. The reader is constantly being asked to take local behavior as representative of a wider and more disparate society, and this is not always convincing. The recent work done by B. W. Labaree warns that such an approach to the thirteen colonies can be beset with difficulties.2