Dishonored Americans: The Political Death of Loyalists in Revolutionary America by Timothy Compeau (review)

Book Review| July 01 2004 Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan: Letters and Memoirs from Colonial and Revolutionary America, 1675-1815 Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan: Letters and Memoirs from Colonial and Revolutionary America, 1675-1815, Kerby A. Miller, Arnold Schrier, Bruce Bowling and David N. Doyle. Brian Clarke Brian Clarke Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of American Ethnic History (2004) 23 (4): 161–162. https://doi.org/10.2307/27501499 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Brian Clarke; Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan: Letters and Memoirs from Colonial and Revolutionary America, 1675-1815. Journal of American Ethnic History 1 January 2004; 23 (4): 161–162. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/27501499 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressJournal of American Ethnic History Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2004 Immigration and Ethnic History Society2004 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Reviewed by: Running from Bondage: Enslaved Women and Their Remarkable Fight for Freedom in Revolutionary America by Karen Cook Bell Jessica Blake Running from Bondage: Enslaved Women and Their Remarkable Fight for Freedom in Revolutionary America. By Karen Cook Bell. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Pp. viii, 248. $24.95, ISBN 978-1-108-83154-3.) In 1770, an enslaved "mulatto" woman named Margaret Grant fled her enslaver in Baltimore, only to be recaptured and resold. She escaped again while pregnant in 1773, before disappearing from the historical record, perhaps as a free woman. In Running from Bondage: Enslaved Women and Their Remarkable Fight for Freedom in Revolutionary America, Karen Cook Bell contends that "Black women … built a culture and a politics of resistance to slavery" through running away in the late eighteenth century (p. 161). Drawing on runaway advertisements, court cases, and abolitionist narratives, Cook Bell reframes women's flight as defiance against the institution of slavery. Foundational work by Sylvia R. Frey and Gary B. Nash focuses on the contributions of Black men and women who fought and labored during the American Revolution. Building on scholarship by Deborah Gray White and Stephanie M. H. Camp, Cook Bell considers the unique obstacles that women faced when trying to secure their freedom. Unlike men, enslaved women had fewer opportunities to travel and thus to break free. Motherhood further limited women's mobility, leaving them unable to move rapidly when pregnant or with young children in tow. Women had to collaborate with other enslaved people and members of society to plan their escape carefully. In five chronological chapters centered on the experiences of women around the American Revolution, Cook Bell explores individual portraits of escape. Chapter 1 focuses on how reproduction and motherhood made it more difficult for enslaved women to flee. Chapter 2 centers on the flight and recapture of Margaret Grant, a pregnant enslaved woman from Baltimore, Maryland. In chapters 3 and 4, Cook Bell pivots to other women, such as Elizabeth "Bett" [End Page 544] Freeman, who sued for her freedom by drawing on the revolutionary ideals expressed in the Massachusetts state constitution (1780), which declared all men "born free and equal" (p. 113). Chapter 5 follows enslaved women's refuge in countryside locations such as the Dismal Swamp of Virginia and the bayous of lower Louisiana. Cook Bell makes a compelling case that Black women took political action through flight and emancipation lawsuits. Elizabeth Freeman's use of the Massachusetts constitution most explicitly demonstrates Black women's adoption of new legal arguments, or to use the framework of Cook Bell, it reveals a new "radical consciousness" (p. 4). As much as Cook Bell interweaves rich storylines, she refrains from quantifying how many enslaved women escaped slavery, from where they escaped, and how their numbers changed over the course of the Revolution. Cook Bell offers captivating narratives of daring women, but she avoids discussion of whether the Revolutionary era inspired a larger or broader demographic group of women to run away. For example, by tracking fluctuations in runaway advertisements, Cook Bell could make a more persuasive claim about the widespread nature of enslaved women's politicization. In a more intriguing contribution, Cook Bell demonstrates that enslaved women forged a more revolutionary society through their collaborations with non-enslaved people. Both Grant and Freeman enlisted white men—a British convict and an abolitionist lawyer, respectively—to facilitate their efforts for independence. Likewise, runaways such as Maria exploited imperial discord between the Spanish and the French to build maroon enclaves in St. Malo, Louisiana. Certainly, enslaved women leveraged an awareness of colonial politics, but they also fostered relationships across race and class lines. In all, Cook Bell deftly pieces together engrossing stories of escape to draw out a larger, vibrant portrait of Black female resistance. Jessica Blake Austin Peay State University Copyright © 2022 The Southern Historical Association

Book Review| March 01 2008 Women and Authorship in Revolutionary America; Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America's Republic American Literature (2008) 80 (1): 170–172. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2007-067 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Women and Authorship in Revolutionary America; Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America's Republic. American Literature 1 March 2008; 80 (1): 170–172. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2007-067 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsAmerican Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2008 by Duke University Press2008 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Book Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

Journal Article The Pursuit of Science in Revolutionary America, 1735–1789. By Brooke Hindle. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture. 1956. Pp. xi, 410. $7.50.) Get access The Pursuit of Science in Revolutionary America, 1735–1789. By Hindle Brooke. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture. 1956. Pp. xi, 410. $7.50.) Donald Fleming Donald Fleming Brown University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 62, Issue 2, January 1957, Pages 404–405, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/62.2.404 Published: 01 January 1957

Reviewed by: Common Bondage: Slavery as Metaphor in Revolutionary America François Furstenberg (bio) Keywords Slavery, Revolutionary War, Abolition Common Bondage: Slavery as Metaphor in Revolutionary America. By Peter Dorsey. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2009. Pp. xviii + 276. Cloth, $43.95.) Eighteenth-century British North Americans, who benefited from some of the highest standards of living and greatest political and religious freedoms [End Page 708] in the Atlantic world, found themselves, in the 1770s, sitting in coffee houses, sipping tea infused with sugar, smoking pipes of tobacco, wearing indigo-dyed clothes—and denouncing “slavery.” By that term they did not mean the real slavery of some half-million people of African descent on the North American mainland, but rather a metaphoric slavery that, in their fevered imaginations, threatened the political liberties of people of European descent. The spectacle has long fascinated and repelled observers. From Samuel Johnson’s famous quip in the 1770s to the great scholarship in the late 1960s and 1970s by Edmund Morgan, David Brion Davis, Winthrop Jordan, and others, these slave drivers yelping for liberty have generated penetrating commentary. The literary scholar Peter Dorsey now launches himself into the mix with a stimulating and frustrating study, the most detailed exploration to date of what he calls “the slavery metaphor” in British North America. Dorsey makes a strong case for a venerable historical interpretation: that the Revolution undermined slavery. The slavery metaphor—by its own internal logic—pulled down the barriers between political and chattel slavery, between slavery as figure of speech and slavery as coerced labor, and led, almost inevitably, to abolition in the North and a wave of emancipation in the South. Dorsey shows how this process worked, in part, through the operation of language itself. Drawing on theories of metaphor, he recruits an array of thinkers—from Hobbes and Locke in seventeenth century to Wayne Booth, Jacques Derrida, George Lakoff, Paul Ricoeur, Toni Morrison, Richard Rorty, and Hayden White (among others) in the twentieth—to argue that metaphor can “bring about a semantic change or a redescription of reality” (24). Which is precisely what the slavery metaphor accomplished: It “altered the reality of eighteenth-century white Americans,” provoking them “to imagine themselves as slaves” (25). It thus “merged revolutionary goals and antislavery activism,” and “altered the way patriots spoke about slavery” (28, 111). Anchored in the rhetoric of colonial resistance, the slavery metaphor made Whigs vulnerable to charges of “hypocrisy” (85, passim). Loyalists, pushing full-bore into the ideological breach, adopted an increasingly antislavery position to highlight their opponents’ liability. In response, Whigs had no choice but to embrace the cause. Abolitionists then jumped through this “rhetorical opening,” using the Whigs’ metaphoric language against the institution of slavery (156). “White abolitionists, African Americans, as well as Royalists, repeatedly and forcefully [End Page 709] challenged Whig writers to live up to their words” (108). It all resulted in “growing antislavery convictions” across the colonies (110). “Patriots,” Dorsey argues, “increasingly believed that eliminating slavery was the price they were going to have to pay for independence” (113). So far did antislavery sentiment go, it gave rise to the terrifying specter of total race war—a 180–degree turn of Fortune’s wheel—leading black writers like Phillis Wheatley to “assuage the widespread racial fears ignited by the Revolution” and its militant live-free-or-die language by emphasizing benevolent, Christian virtues that ultimately undermined the struggle for abolition itself (173). Despite this turn, however, “the patriots’ antislavery sentiments continued to shape the consciences of American,” and, in the long run, “would continue to remind white Americans that chattel slavery self-evidently conflicted with their founding ideals” (217–18). But Dorsey is not content with a simple linear account; his book pushes in many directions along the way. The slavery metaphor was, as Dorsey shows, “ever flexible,” employed by a variety of actors to a variety of ends (72). Even as it drove white Americans toward antislavery, it also promoted “contempt” for slaves and stimulated “great racial differentiation . . . [by] suggesting that those who have already submitted to slavery were unworthy of freedom” (30). The slavery metaphor also “altered the era’s understanding of gender” by opposing...

Reviewed by: The Public Universal Friend: Jemima Wilkinson and Religious Enthusiasm in Revolutionary America by Paul B Moyer Kyle B. Roberts The Public Universal Friend: Jemima Wilkinson and Religious Enthusiasm in Revolutionary America. By Paul B. Moyer. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2015, 264 pages, $27.95 Cloth. On 11 October 1776, family and friends were startled to discover that the person they had known as Jemima Wilkinson, a twenty-three-year-old Quaker woman from Rhode Island, had, upon recovering from what looked like a fatal illness, been reborn as the Public Universal Friend. A divine genderless spirit had taken the body of “an unremarkable person who lived in an unremarkable corner of early America” (13), as historian Paul B. Moyer explains in his new book, in order to serve as a holy messenger preparing the world for the return of Christ. The Universal Friend’s embrace of male and female attributes would be a cause of wonderment— and consternation—for the next four decades. While dozens of books have been written about Ann Lee, that other revolutionary-era prophet and founder of the Shakers whose ministry radically challenged spiritual and secular gender conventions of the time, less attention has been paid to Wilkinson. Moyer’s welcome study is only the third book-length exploration of the prophet, following Herbert A. Wisbey Jr’s classic Pioneer Prophetess (1964) and Frances Dumas’s more recent The Unquiet World (2010). It is a study focused as much on the women and men who followed the Universal Friend—numbering 260 strong at their peak in 1790—as it is about their spiritual leader. Where the surviving primary source material written by the Universal Friend runs thin, Moyer’s consideration of the experience of her devoted followers—as well as her apostates—provides a rich picture of belief and practice. The arrival of the Universal Friend in the fall of 1776 was well-timed. Radical overturning of convention seemed suddenly possible in the months after thirteen North American colonies declared independence from Great Britain. Much like the Revolution itself, the story of the Universal Friend’s ministry is a combination of radical and conservative strains. While scholars have acknowledged the opportunities the Revolution offered for innovation, Moyer cautiously pushes back against interpretations by historians [End Page 239] of American religion and gender that see fewer gains for women in the post-revolutionary institutionalization of religion. In the Universal Friend’s gender-bending presentation of self, but perhaps even more importantly in the communities of the faithful, emerged modes of women’s spiritual leadership that surpassed other Protestant groups of the time. Not only is this a chronological study of the life and ministry of an unusual religious figure and followers, but Moyer recognizes how their experience provides a valuable lens on larger issues shaping revolutionary and early national America. Despite a tradition of dividing American religious activity into First and Second Great Awakenings that straddle the war for independence, Moyer joins Steve Marini and other scholars in showing how the conflict fueled religious activity. The Quakers from southeastern New England who made up the majority of the Universal Friend’s initial converts felt the onset of war acutely. Close analysis of early followers’ writings convincingly reveals that instability, anxiety, and loss were more salient factors in their decision than social or economic concerns. Early converts led fairly comfortable lives but were spiritual seekers hungry for a path to salvation, encouragement to develop their individual spiritual gifts, and stability and order in a time when political allegiances were suspect. The Universal Friend’s message, Moyer argues, was a combination of fairly standard orthodox religious themes not unlike those embraced by contemporary Quakers and New Light evangelicals, but its delivery “with a disarming confidence and air of conviction” (24) by such an unconventional messenger offered comfort in the midst of an unsettling war. In expanding the ministry to Philadelphia after the war, the Universal Friend and followers were opened up to discussion in a vibrant urban public sphere. Unorthodox ideas about gender conventions provoked more debate than the Universal Friend’s orthodox creed. Philadelphians took to their newspapers to express their anxieties about...

Journal Article Linda K. Kerber. Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Va. 1980. Pp. xiv, 304. Cloth $19.50, paper $9.00 Get access Kerber Linda K.. Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Va. 1980. Pp. xiv, 304. Cloth $19.50, paper $9.00. Linda Grant De Pauw Linda Grant De Pauw George Washington University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 86, Issue 4, October 1981, Pages 916–917, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/86.4.916-a Published: 01 October 1981

The Founding Fathers and Debate over Religion in Revolutionary America: A History in Documents. Edited by Matthew L. Harris and Thomas S. Kidd. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012, Pp. ix, 196. $19.95, paper.); Faith of Founders: Religion and New Nation, 1776-1826. By Edwin S. Gaustad. 2nd ed. (Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2011, ix, 173, illus.. $24.95 paper.); Faith of Postwar Presidents: From Truman to Obama. By David L. Holmes. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012, xiii, 396. $29.95.)The first book, an anthology edited by Matthew L. Harris and Thomas S. Kidd, offers forty-three documents centering on role of in revolutionary America. The perceptive introduction, together with accompanying selections, reveals complexity of issues relating to or nature of founder's beliefs. It is hardly surprising that Anyone trying to project current political disputes onto revolutionary past quickly stumbles (23). Some documents contain surprises. One learns, for example, that many revolutionary state constitutions included religious oaths for office-holding, with the Christian Protestant religion declared as established faith of South Carolina (43). More evidence is needed for authors' claim that Madison saw humans as basically good (85). The omission of two crucial sentences from selection of Franklin's Autobiography (1791), leads to less nuanced portrait of man's than was actually case (166). The authors assert that Hamilton favored elite merchants and profit-driven manufacturers while Jefferson sought nation dominated by independent farmers, claim that such works as Forrest McDonald's Presidency of Thomas Jefferson (Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas,1976) have found at best simplistic.The late Edwin Gaustad, long major figure in writing American church history, offers revision of his Faith of Founders, first published in 1986. Based on James Sprunt lectures delivered at Union Theological Seminary (Richmond), this beautifully written book shows complexity of church-state relations in early republic. Gaustad portrays Jefferson and Madison as libertarians: Jefferson was sufficiently secular to oppose thanksgiving proclamations, days of prayer, and times of devotion; Madison did not want military chaplains. The author calls Franklin surely freethinker (51) though Autobiography and 1790 letter to Yale president Ezra Stiles convey more conventional deism. Similarly Gaustad claims that George Washington, though nominally an Anglican, manifested a cool deism (64). The worldview of John Adams might be most fascinating of all, for second president found doctrine of original sin, in Gaustad's words, a cheap and easy escape from moral responsibility (77). Adams saw John Wesley as one of most remarkable Characters that enthusiasm, superstition, fanaticism ever produced (80). He took peculiar position of detesting Calvinism while affirming God's absolute sovereignty.The third book is written by David Holmes, who has contributed another valuable work on this topic, The Faiths of Founding Fathers (New York: Oxford, 2006). In an equally excellent study, Holmes now tackles span of presidents ranging from Truman to Obama. Holmes's style is lively, his research extensive, showing grounding in myriad of biographies, articles, websites, and manuscript collections in presidential libraries. …

A union of interests: Political and economic thought in revolutionary America: Cathy D. Matson and Peter S. Onuf (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1990), x + 237 pp., Cloth. n.p.

New World tells the stranger-than-fiction story of Lord Dunmore, the last royal governor of Virginia, whose long-neglected life boasts a measure of scandal and intrigue rare in the annals of the colonial world. Dunmore not only issued the first formal proclamation of emancipation in American history; he also undertook an unauthorized Indian war in the Ohio Valley, now known as Dunmore's War, that was instrumental in opening the Kentucky country to white settlement. In this entertaining biography, James Corbett David brings together a rich cast of characters as he follows Dunmore on his perilous path through the Atlantic world from 1745 to 1809.Dunmore was a Scots aristocrat who, even with a family history of treason, managed to obtain a commission in the British army, a seat in the House of Lords, and three executive appointments in the American colonies. He was an unusual figure, deeply invested in the imperial system but quick to break with convention. Despite his 1775 proclamation promising freedom to slaves of Virginia rebels, Dunmore was himself a slaveholder at a time when the African slave trade was facing tremendous popular opposition in Great Britain. He also supported his daughter throughout the scandal that followed her secret, illegal marriage to the youngest son of George III a relationship that produced two illegitimate children, both first cousins of Queen Victoria. Within this single narrative, Dunmore interacts with Jacobites, slaves, land speculators, frontiersmen, Scots merchants, poor white fishermen, the French, the Spanish, Shawnees, Creeks, patriots, loyalists, princes, kings, and a host of others. This history captures the vibrant diversity of the political universe that Dunmore inhabited alongside the likes of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. A transgressive imperialist, Dunmore had an astounding career that charts the boundaries of what was possible in the Atlantic world in the Age of Revolution.

The New England singing school brought more than a new form of musical training to colonial and Revolutionary America. It also touched off a process of ritual change that permanently altered the religious culture of New England Congregationalism. The singing school first emerged in the early eighteenth century as a vehicle through which ministers asserted their cultic control over a restive laity. By mid‐century, however, the emergence of itinerant lay singing masters had created a class of ritual specialists who challenged the traditional institutional authority of the clergy. The process of change intensified still further in the Revolutionary era as singing school scholars formed choirs who demanded special status as a lay community of ritual performers. By the end of the Revolution, the New England singing school had also changed the content of Congregationalist religious culture itself by providing a new ritual repertory of American musical settings for the sacred poetry of Isaac Watts that quickly replaced traditional Puritan psalmody.

"Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America by Linda K. Kerber, Chape Hill." Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, 13(3), pp. 52–53

Aleine Austin. Matthew Lyon : "New Man " of the Democratic Revolution 1749-1822. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1981. 192 + xii pp. Lawrence Delbert Cress. Citizens in Arms: The Army and the Militia in American Society to the War of 1812. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982. 238 + xiv pp. Drew McCoy. The Elusive Republic : Political Economy in Jeffersonian America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980. 268 + xi pp. Ever since J. Franklin Jameson published his little book on the American Revolution as a social movement, historians have probed the issue of social change in Revolutionary America. Currently, social and intellectual history have blended comfortably, and in turn inform more traditional topics. So it seems a natural product of historiographical evolution to have a social study of the military and an intellectual study of economics. But this trend relates closely to another aspect of the historiography of the Revolutionary era— the ideological interpretation of politics, constitutionalism and law that began with Bernard Bailyn's seminal studies of the 1960s.

161 LEE WARD. The Politics of Liberty in England and Revolutionary America. Cambridge: Cambridge, 2004. Pp. x ⫹ 459. $90. There are two competing stories about the ideological meaning of England ’s Exclusion Crisis and its aftermath . According to one, the ‘‘Liberal Consensus,’’ the key figure was Locke, whose Second Treatise of Government, written during the crisis although not published until many years later, defended the propositions that all people bear natural rights, that political authority comes from the consent of the governed , and that subjects have a right to revolt against their sovereign when the latter fails to uphold the terms of the social contract. On this view, the Whig side in the Exclusion Crisis was really interested in limited government and individual liberty; and their aborted revolution served as the first warning of the coming age of tolerance, commerce, secularism, and the rise of ‘‘possessive individualism.’’ After Locke’s ideas finally won out during the Glorious Revolution of 1688, it took less than a century for them to jump the Atlantic and serve as the ideological foundation of the American Revolution. In the alternative story, called the ‘‘Republican Synthesis,’’ the key thinker of the Exclusion Crisis was James Harrington, along with the other civic humanists of the middle- and lateseventeenth century, who defended the importance of participatory government, the separation of powers, a written constitution , and the cultivation of civic virtue over bare individual liberty. On this view, the Whig side of the Exclusion Crisis was really interested in civic virtue as expressed in collective self-rule by the gentry, and their aborted revolution served as the first warning of the coming age of democracy, egalitarianism , nationalism, and the rise of ‘‘republicanism.’’ Needless to say, after Harrington’s ideas finally won out during the Glorious Revolution of 1688, it took less than a century for them to jump the Atlantic and serve as the ideological foundation of the American Revolution. These two stories have dominated the study of Anglo-American politics for nearly a century. The ‘‘liberal’’ reading came on the scene in the 1920’s as a needed corrective to a narrowly economic interpretation of Anglo-American political history, but as soon as it had established its claim that ideas are a fundamental force in political history, the fight was on regarding which ideas dominated during this tumultuous period . The champions of the two camps constitute a who’s who of modern intellectual history, with the likes of Carl Becker, Louis Hartz, and Richard Hofstadter on the ‘‘liberal’’ side and Caroline Robbins, Gordon Wood, and J. G. A. Pocock on the ‘‘republican.’’ Today, these interpretations have reached a kind of stalemate. Most historians would agree that people’s ideas and values play an essential role in the movement of political history, and also that both liberal and republican ideologies were at work in this period on both sides of the north Atlantic. In his new book, Mr. Ward, wishing to end the stalemate, argues that that liberalism and republicanism were two strands of a single, complex Whig political philosophy that used every means at its disposal to oppose divine right absolutism. The point of his study is: ‘‘Through detailed analysis of the major Whig Exclusion era tracts by James Tyrrell, Al- 162 gernon Sidney, and John Locke, we will observe the emergence of distinctively liberal and republican modes of thought and discourse.’’ For the most part, it succeeds wonderfully. Mr. Ward’s simple but profound contribution to the debate shows that the liberal and republican interpretations present a false dichotomy—they both can be true. The intellectual forces that shaped the Exclusion Crisis and Glorious Revolution drew strength from the principles of natural liberty and individual rights as well as from the principles of civic virtue and political participation . The Whig political discourse of the period emphasized the value of liberty as well as the importance of virtue, which means that it is overly simplistic and schematic to reduce the whole conversation to a single paradigm. Mr. Ward does an excellent job of recreating the intellectual milieu of the Exclusion Crisis by revivifying the major alternative political philosophies, many of which are virtually unknown today, that formed the...

Since its publication in 1976, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America has been recognized as a classic study of the career of the foremost political pamphleteer of the Age of Revolution, and a model of how to integrate the political, intellectual, and social history of the struggle for American independence. Foner skillfully brings together an account of Paine’s remarkable career with a careful examination of the social worlds within which he operated, in Great Britain, France, and especially the United States. He explores Paine’s political and social ideas and the way he popularized them by pioneering a new form of political writing, using simple, direct language and addressing himself to a reading public far broader than previous writers had commanded. He shows which of Paine’s views remained essentially fixed throughout his career, while directing attention to the ways his stance on social questions evolved under the pressure of events. This enduring work makes clear the tremendous impact Paine’swriting exerted on the American Revolution, and suggests why he failed to have a similar impact during his career in revolutionary France. It also offers new insights into the nature and internal tensions of the republican outlook that helped to shape the Revolution. In a new preface, Foner discusses the origins of this book and the influences of the 1960s and 1970s on its writing. He also looks at how Paine has been adopted by scholars and politicians of many stripes, and has even been called the patron saint of the Internet.