The American Revolution Reborn ed. by Patrick Spero and Michael Zuckerman (review)

This collection, to quote one of its co-editors, is a "subversive book" committed to "decentering and destabilizing" previous narratives of the American Revolution by offering readers "a variety of vivifying perspectives" (301, 303, 305). More prosaically, this excellent and eclectic volume points the way toward exciting new avenues of research in the history of the Revolution while simultaneously offering insights that will interest scholars of every stripe.

Spero's introduction effectively lays out the stakes: This volume intends to "reinvigorate a field" by rejecting older historical paradigms and focusing on "the Revolution as lived experience" (2-3). The majority of the chapters live up to this ambitious goal (regrettably, space does not permit a consideration of each one individually). To take a few examples, Michael McDonnell, in what could be a second introduction to the collection, offers a stirring argument for the benefits of "history that makes sense of the stories of the many" rather than only the elite few (14). Following chapters offer compelling microhistories exploring how and why disparate individuals and communities navigated their way between the rebel cause and loyalism or neutrality, and, in some cases, back again. Katherine Carté Engel and Mark Boonshoft remind readers of the importance of religion in early America but they break with previous scholars by stressing the social, rather than ideological, role of competing Protestant sects.

David Hsiung and Zara Anishanslin bring the material history of the Revolution to the forefront. Hsiung, an environmental historian, traces the difficulties encountered in providing American forces with so basic a strategic resource as gunpowder; Anishanslin presents a visceral (and at times disturbing) cultural history of the ways in which frontier violence was commemorated during and after the War. Matthew Spooner, meanwhile, injects an appreciation for lived experience into a study of the political economy of slavery, arguing that in the South, the Revolution was no mere coup d'état, but a bloody and radical orgy of redistributionary violence. Together, these essays present a picture of the Revolution that is "far more conflicted . . . less heroic, and ultimately more human" than the founding myths familiar to most Americans (47).

Zuckerman's conclusion offers a wonderfully witty critique of the neo-Whig and neoprogressive schools of thought that have long dominated Revolutionary historiography, while celebrating the innovative scholarship of the "new generation" of scholars represented in the volume's pages (301, 303). It is worth wondering what it means for the future of Revolutionary scholarship that only three of the authors are women. Overall, the scholarship contained in the volume lives up to Spero's and McDonnell's calls for more inclusive and intellectually invigorating approaches to history. At the same time, Zuckerman offers the rather dark observation that academia's and the public's current willingness to see the Revolution as more chaotic, more bloody, and more self-interested than allowed by previous narratives likely stems from the ugliness of modern American politics (this in a piece written before the 2016 election). This is Revolutionary history for our own revolutionary times.