Reflections on the Revolution in America

Abstract

Wallace Coyle and William M. Fowler, eds. The American Revolution : Changing Perspectives. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1979. 231 + xiv pp. W. Robert Higgins, ed. The Revolutionary War in the South: Power, Conflict, and Leadership: Essays in Honor of John Richard Alden. Durham, N.C. : Duke University Press, 1979. 291 + xxii pp. Linda K. Kerber. Women of the Republic: Intellect andIdeologv in Revolutionary America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press (For the Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia), 1980.304 +xiv pp. Leopold S. Launitz-Schurer, Jr. Loyal Whigs and Revolutionaries: The Making of the Revolution in New York, 1765-1776. New York: New York University Press, 1980. 225 + xiv pp. Seven years after the flood of studies which accompanied the American Bicentennial in 1976, the American Revolution continues to command the intellects and energies of historians. An array of monographs and interpre- tive studies has poured from the presses, chipping away at the neo-Whig analysis of the origins of the Revolution established by Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood in the 1960s. While some scholars have tried to offer alter- native interpretations, others have studied neglected topics, intending to fill in gaps in information. Of the four books under review, Higgins' The Revolu- tionary War in the South and Kerber's Women of the Republic address issues which have long awaited imaginative treatment. Coyle and Fowler's The American Revolution: Changing Perspectives, a collection of essays, summarizes recent scholarship on the Revolutionary era, and Launitz-Schiirer's Loyal Whigs and Revolutionaries looks afresh at the relationship between provincial factional struggles and the forging of revolutionary loyalties in New York. All four volumes make solid contributions to the study of the American Revolution, but Women of the Republic stands out as a book which could substantially alter the questions asked by both historians of the Revolution and of women.