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135 Historians Extend the Reach of the American Revolution Gregory H. Nobles Introduction Could the study of the American Revolution ever be over? It may have seemed that way to some historians attending the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians—held, quite appropriately, in Boston —on a late Friday afternoon in March 2004. After sitting in a hotel meeting room for over an hour and listening to several presentations surveying “The State of the Field: The American Revolution,” a few people expressed their persistent suspicion that the field had become rather sparse in recent days, that the history of the American Revolution had already been essentially written, that all the good work had been done, and done some time ago. One member of the audience even admitted to his colleagues that in making up his syllabus for a course on the Revolution, he found himself assigning books published three decades ago. In reporting a few months later on this historian’s professional confession, Pauline Maier humorously suggested that the professor assign her own thirty-somethingyear -old book, but she also admitted that he might have had a point. “Scholarship on the Revolution between 1960 and 1980 was so intense,” she observed, “that it was perhaps destined to go into a certain eclipse.” She added a hopeful note that “there’s no doubt that it will become a more active field,” but she also noted the somewhat darker conclusions of other colleagues in the profession. A junior scholar, she said, had complained that “the literature of the founding period is . . . approaching saturation,” 136 Gregory H. Nobles and a more senior scholar had declared that “all the big questions have been answered.”1 Any estimation of eclipse or saturation in a scholarly field depends, of course, on what questions get asked. In surveying the historical literature on the American Revolution in the years surrounding the turn of the twenty-first century—that is, the period that picks up past the coverage in the first essay in this volume—my own reading of the scholarly record is that fresh questions keep coming up and that the study of the Revolution remains as intellectually exciting a field as it ever was. When J. Franklin Jameson wrote that “the stream of revolution, once started, could not be confined within narrow banks,” he could just as well have been talking about the scholarship of the Revolution. Today, historians do not typically look back to Jameson as a specific frame of reference, but they do continue to underscore his observation that the Revolution cannot be seen as “solely a series of political or military events.” Modern scholars offer us an increasingly inclusive view of American society, bringing a larger and more diverse ensemble of historical figures into view—prominent men in positions of political and military leadership, to be sure, along with men and women in the middling or lower rungs of Euro-American society, but also African Americans, both enslaved and free, and Native Americans, some of them quite far away from the immediate battlegrounds contested by Great Britain and the American colonies. This more expansive approach now challenges us to extend not only the societal reach of the Revolution but also its temporal bounds; it is becoming increasingly common to look beyond the traditional time frame of 1763–89 and talk of the “long” Revolution that lasted well past the framing of the Constitution and had much wider implications beyond the creation of an independent nation. One of the big questions that remains, then, is “Whose American Revolution was it?” My approach to answering it in the pages that follow is not to describe a vast scholarly divide between studying the experiences of people at the top of society as opposed to those at the bottom, nor is 1 Pauline Maier reported on the OAH session in her keynote address “Teaching the Nation’s History,” delivered to the National Endowment for the Humanities “We the People” Forum (2004), published in Humanities 25 (July–Aug. 2004) and available online at http://www.neh.gov/news/ humanities/2004-07/nationshistory.html (accessed July 30, 2010). Maier’s older book, to which she referred, is From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765–1776 (New York, 1972). Among Maier’s more recent contributions to keeping the field active are two books on the nation’s founding documents: American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (New York, 1997) and Ratification...

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