The Cause: The American Revolution and Its Discontents, 1773–1783

Abstract

Joseph J. Ellis has sold many books by telling rousing stories of the American Revolution that break little new historical ground. The Cause is yet another. The stories are well told, but they are the standard fare: the writing of the Declaration of Independence, George Washington's disastrous defense of New York in 1776, the winter at Valley Forge, the post-Saratoga stalemate, Britain's southern campaign. Ellis's fans will find plenty of eerie familiarity with his prior books. In fact, the first half of The Cause is basically a recycled version of Ellis's 2013 book, Revolutionary Summer, with most of the same quotes and anecdotes, told nearly word for word in some passages. What is new (at least for an Ellis book) are the odd, little two-to-three-page “profiles” at the end of each chapter that address groups Ellis all but ignores in the main text: women, enslaved people, Indians. This treatment reflects Ellis's view that full integration of these subjects represents “politically correct isometric exercises” (p. xvi). So, Ellis offers only terse, sterile minibiographies that call to mind social studies textbooks of the 1970s with their little blue boxes that segregated women and nonwhites from the central interpretive narrative.