Whose American Revolution Was It?: Historians Interpret the Founding

I. Refocusing on the Founders

Historians Extend the Reach of the American Revolution 137 it to insist on stretching the traditional limits of the Revolutionary era to fit a longer time frame. I want to argue, ultimately, that these different perspectives on the past can do much to inform each other and that the best historical works do indeed bridge this apparent gap: by bringing both prominent leaders and ordinary people together in the same view, they help us see them as they doubtless sometimes saw each other, as fellow participants in an unfolding historical process that had sometimes uncertain boundaries. To ask “Whose American Revolution was it?” asks us to rethink both terms, “American” and “Revolution,” and in doing so, to appreciate the ways that serious scholarship continues to refresh the field. To ask that question, in fact, makes us realize that the Revolution encompassed essentially everyone on the scene at the time. As scholars continue to explore their stories, its history will never fall into eclipse. I. Refocusing on the Founders 1. Twenty-first-Century “Founders Chic” Some the most familiar faces have found renewed life in the new century , and they now invite careful scrutiny in the context of the times, both their own and ours. One compelling indication of the continuing interest in the Revolution is an outburst of biographical studies of the Founders , quite a few of which became sudden best-sellers that far surpassed the market for typical academic offerings. To be sure, biography has always been an active area of historical writing, and studies of the leading figures of the Revolution have long been popular with the reading public, reaching back to Parson Weems’s didactic and largely fictitious biography of George Washington. But the turn of the twenty-first century brought a remarkable upsurge of interest in the Founders—what Newsweek dubbed “Founders Chic”—that seemed striking even for so familiar a historical genre.2 Rightly anticipating a rapidly emerging market in the most famous men of the Revolutionary era, trade presses soon found accommodating authors, both academics and others, who got into the biographical act. 2 Evan Thomas, “Founders Chic: Live from Philadelphia,” Newsweek, July 9, 2001, 48. After originating in the popular press, the term later made its way into scholarly publications. See, for instance, David Waldstreicher, “Founders Chic as Culture Wars,” Radical History Review 84 (2002): 185–94; and Jeffrey Pasley, Andrew W. Robertson, and David Waldstreicher, eds., Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004). 138 Gregory H. Nobles The big news in the publishing industry, at least as far as historical writing on the American Revolution was concerned, had a bold headline: the twenty-first century started with a biographical bang. The bang, however, echoed with important reverberations, causing scholars and other observers to try to assess the meaning of what it all meant. No book became more immediately emblematic of the sudden-seeming fascination with the Founders than David McCullough’s best-selling biography of John Adams, which set the publishing world afire when it first hit the stores in early summer of 2001: it quickly went on to sales of several million hardcover and paperback copies and, in 2008, a made-for-TV miniseries.3 McCullough was by no means the only author to focus on Adams in recent years—John Ferling and Joseph Ellis had both published substantial studies of Adams in the 1990s—but he was undoubtedly the best known: a gifted writer of a sizable string of big but readable books, he had also become familiar to the public as the lead narrator for Ken Burns’s epic public-television documentary series The Civil War (1990), providing an authoritative but still avuncular voice that resonated with a reassuring, matter-of-fact gravitas.4 McCullough’s treatment of John Adams did nothing to break new scholarly ground, but that was not his purpose; rather, it was to give readers a pleasing, even uplifting portrait of a man McCullough felt had been too often dismissed as difficult, irascible, and perhaps overintellectual to a fault. In McCullough’s own estimation, the most significant common thread that tied his biography of Adams to his previous work was a consistent concern with another sort of quality—heroism. “All my books are about courage and what makes civilization,” he told a reporter for CNN. “I’m interested in the creators.” Given that emphasis, his study of John Adams seemed to him a logical...