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March/April 2005 ยท Historically Speaking 25 2 Benjamin Franklin: Writings (Library of America, 1987), 520. 3 An incomplete list of this work includes Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years ' War and the Fate ofEmpire in British North America, 1754-1766 (Knopf, 2000); Gregory Evans Dowd, War Under Heaven: Pontiac, the Indian Nations, & The British Empire (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); Eric Hinderaker, Elusive Empires: Constructing Colonialism in the Ohio Valley, 1673-1800 (Cambridge University Press, 1997); Jane T. Merritt, At the Crossroads: Indians & Empires on a Mid-Atlantic Frontier, 1700-1763 (University of North Carolina Press, 2003); and Geoffrey Plank, An Unsettled Conquest: The British Campaign against the Peoples ofAcadia (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001). 4 Another incomplete list would include David Armitage, The Ideological Origins ofthe British Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2000); Armitage, "The Declaration of Independence and International Law," William and Mary Quarterly 3d ser., 59 (2002): 39-64; Eliga H. Gould, "Zones of Law, Zones ofViolence: The Legal Geography of the British Atlantic, circa 1772," William and Mary Quarterly 3d ser., 60 (2003): 471-510; and Peter Onuf, Jefferson 'sEmpire: The Language of American Nationhood (University Press of Virginia, 2000), esp. ch. 2. Also see T.H. Breen's call for a greater sensitivity to the British context of the Revolution in "Ideology and Nationalism on the Eve of the American Revolution: Revisions Once More in Need of Revising," Journal of American History 84 (1997): 13-39. 5 Onuf, Jefferson's Empire, esp. 57-61; Pocock, "States, Republics, and Empires: The American Founding in Early Modern Perspective," in Terrence J. Ball and J. G. A. Pocock, eds., Conceptual Change and the Constitution (University Press of Kansas, 1988), esp. 66-73. 6 Greene, Peripheries and Centers: Constitutional Development in the Extended Polities ofthe British Empire and the United States 1607-1788 (University of Georgia Press, 1986), 205. 7 For a brief exploration of the question, see my "Visions of another Empire: John Ledyard, American Traveler Across the Russian Empire, 1 787-88," Journal ofthe Early Republic 24 (2004): 347-380. Continuity and Change in Early American Studies Don Higginbotham Iwant to devote my space mainly to the first of the three "disjunctions" that Maier describes as characterizing early American history today: the tendency to separate colonial and Revolutionary studies, to see them as distinct or scarcely related. This development is relatively new. In their writings and training of graduate students, few if any distinguished historians until recently practiced such compartmentalization. Here one begins with Charles Andrews, the dean of early American historians in the first three or more decades of the 20th century. In the following generation of scholars one thinks of Samuel Eliot Morison, Curtis Nettles, Richard B. Morris, and John R. Alden. One also calls to mind a slightly later group of practitioners such as Bernard Bailyn and Edmund S. Morgan, both preeminent in the field. Others at or near retirement now such as Jack P. Greene and John Murrin also do both colonial and Revolutionary history. People entering the job market in the late 1950s, as I did, almost always found that advertisements about openings in early American history did not express a preference for candidates in pre-1763 America as opposed to post-1763, or vice versa. At my institution, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, we were fortunate over many years to have two faculty positions in pre1800 areas. For thirty-five years my colleague John Nelson and I rotated graduate and undergraduate colonial and Revolutionary course offerings in order for both of us to keep current, as best we could, with new literature and changing interpretations . Another way ofmaking the point about the once-pervasive link between colonial and Revolutionary history is to look at schools of interpretation. The imperial and Progressive schools lost much of their influence in the post-1945 years, but they always agreed on one thing: continuity. The imperialists saw institutional and constitutional developments that were in some measure persistent throughout the 18th century, just as the Progressives saw tensions and divisions in late colonial society that continued into the Revolution and led to the beginnings ofpolitical party development. In the 1950s the consensus academics...

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