Title: The ideological origins of the American Revolution
First published: 1967
Description: This book has developed from a study that was first undertaken a number of years ago, when Howard Mumford Jones, then editor-in-chief of the John Harvard Library, invited me to prepare a collection of pamphlets of the American Revolution for publication in that series. The full bibliography of pamphlets relating to the Anglo-American struggle published in the colonies through the year 1776 contains not a dozen or so items but over four hundred. In the end I concluded that no fewer than seventy-two of them ought to be re-published. But sheer numbers were not the most important measure of the magnitude of the project. The pamphlets include all sorts of writings -- treatises on political theory, essays on history, political arguments, sermons, correspondence, poems -- and they display all sorts of literary devices. But for all their variety they have in common one distinctive characteristic: they are, to an unusual degree, explanatory. They reveal not merely positions taken but the reasons why positions were taken; they review motive and understanding: the assumptions, beliefs, and ideas -- the articulated worldview -- that lay behind the manifest events of the time. As a result I found myself, as I read through these many documents, studying not simply a particular medium of publication but, through these documents, nothing less than the ideological origins of the American Revolution. - Foreword.
Subjects: History, Political science, Historia, Science politique, Histoire, Revolución, open_syllabus_project, Amerikanische Revolution, Causes, Vorgeschichte, American Revolution (1775-1783) fast (OCoLC)fst01351668, War, Political science, united states, United states, history, revolution, 1775-1783, Historia dos estados unidos, Politica (america do norte), Amerikaanse Vrijheidsoorlog, Ideologie
Places: United States, États-Unis, EE.UU
Time periods: Revolution, 1775-1783, 1775-1783 (Révolution)