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Reviewed by:
  • Profiles of Revolutionaries in Atlantic History 1700–1850
  • Richard Warren
Profiles of Revolutionaries in Atlantic History 1700–1850. By R. William Weisberger, Dennis P. Hupchick, David L. Anderson. Boulder: Social Science Monographs, 2007. Pp. vi, 338. Notes. Index. $40.00 cloth

The 15 contributions to this volume range from over 40 pages assessing the character of George Washington to a two-page gloss on the legend of and reality behind “Molly Pitcher” (the only woman included). The selection criteria for inclusion—prominent participation in the revolutions in science and technology or the political revolutions in Europe and the Americas between 1776 and 1848—is both vast and vague. This allows room for the usual suspects of the Western Hemisphere’s wars of independence (Washington, Franklin, Hidalgo, San Martín, Toussaint L’Ouverture) to share space with a later generation of European politicians, intellectuals, and literary figures (John Mitchel, Tocqueville, Pushkin, Louis Kossuth, Lord Byron, Adam Czartoryski), as well as one representative from the French Revolution of 1789 (Jacques-Pierre Brissot), a journalist from the early U.S. Republic (Hezekiah Niles), and a man who spent much of his time devising the means to demonstrate Newtonian principles to a broad English audience (John Theophilus Desaguliers). [End Page 257]

Were the quality of all the contributions equally high, one might applaud the enterprise as eclectic rather than criticize it as conceptually flawed, for a number of the essays are interesting and well written. Overall, though, they vary dramatically in theme, length, scope, intellectual rigor, and ambition. For example, the historiography on the wars of independence in Spanish America has moved well beyond the treatment accorded Hidalgo and San Martín here. In sum, the editors of this volume assert that the audience for this cabinet of curiosities should include “scholars, college students, and general readers” (p. 1). Unfortunately, each of these constituencies would have reason to be disappointed by some of its contents. [End Page 258]

Richard Warren
Saint Joseph’s University
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
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