The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America [Mass Market Paperback]

Gary B. Nash (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 30, 2006

In this audacious recasting of the American Revolution, distinguished historian Gary Nash offers a profound new way of thinking about the struggle to create this country, introducing readers to a coalition of patriots from all classes and races of American society. From millennialist preachers to enslaved Africans, disgruntled women to aggrieved Indians, the people so vividly portrayed in this book did not all agree or succeed, but during the exhilarating and messy years of this country’s birth, they laid down ideas that have become part of our inheritance and ideals toward which we still strive today.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The history of the American Revolution that most of us have absorbed is but "a fable," writes UCLA historian Nash. In this insightful, challenging "antidote to historical amnesia," Nash (Race and Revolution) deftly illustrates that while the Revolution has been implanted in our collective memory as the idealized "Glorious Cause," in reality it was more a chaotic and bloody civil war, replete with fragile alliances, a multitude of fronts and clashing cultures. He especially succeeds in detailing the crucial role and often overlooked plight of Native Americans, adding the obscure names of men such as Cornplanter, Dragging Canoe and Mohawk chief Joseph Brant, who allied the Iroquois nation with the British, to the pantheon of the Revolution's players. By 1789 Washington was forced to commit a third of his army to destroying the Iroquois, explicitly ordering that their villages "not be merely overrun but destroyed." Of course, Native Americans who remained neutral or fought alongside the Americans fared no better later at the hands of settlers. Tightly though densely written, this expertly researched tome shakes the "stainless steel" history of the American Revolution to its core. (June 27)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

You will never think about the Revolution in the same way. (Alfred F. Young, author of Masquerade: The Life and Times of Deborah Sampson, Continental Soldier) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 18 and up
  
• Mass Market Paperback: 544 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (May 30, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 014303720X
• ISBN-13: 978-0143037200
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #207,575 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Founding Children, January 18, 2011

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Giordano Bruno (Wherever I am, I am.) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America (Mass Market Paperback)

Lemuel Haynes, James Forten, Arthur Plumb Martin, Salem Poor, Thomas Young, Rezin Hammond, James Cannon, George Bryan, Daniel Roberdeau, Prince Hall, David Rittenhouse ...

Who? Revolutionary patriots, some of the high officers in the Continental Army, every one of whom might as easily be revered as a Founding Father as the wealthy silvermaker Paul Revere, whose role would be totally forgotten but for Longfellow's poem. Go look in the indices of general histories of the Revolution, the sort used as school texts; if any of them are listed, I'll gulp with surprise. Run a search for them on Wikipedia; there you'll find brief articles on all of them except Prince Hall, but none of the articles attribute any `founding' role to them. Why are they so little celebrated? That's one of the themes of Gary B Nash's "The Unknown History of the American Revolution," that it was the work of a good many more ardent patriots than those who eventually signed either the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution of 1789.

Some of the eleven patriots listed above were too radical in their democratic aspirations for the wealthy gents who sought independence without upsetting the hierarchy. Some of them were backcountry farmers or propertyless urban artisans. Some of them were "freemen" -- former slaves -- whose understanding of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" was so-selfishly focused on their own. Then there were the slaves, roughly 12% of the whole population of the thirteen colonies, the Indians both praying and preying, and WOMEN! In the patriarchal society of the 18th C, all these were `children', expected to pay due respect and obedience to their `betters' as humbly as childern to parents. Hence the title of this review, Founding Children. It's worth noting that the Lords of Trade and Parliament applied the same language of proper familial subordination to the colonies, explicitly calling them `selfish, ungrateful children.'

In an oft-quoted letter of 1818, John Adams, a firm believer in deference, especially to himself, wrote: ""The Revolution was effected before the War commenced. The Revolution was in the hearts and minds of the people; a change in their religious sentiments and their duties and obligations ... This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people, was the real American Revolution."" Historian Gary Nash would certainly agree. His first 150 pages, half the book, concentrate entirely on those `hearts and minds' of ordinary, mostly now nameless people who became radicalized and unruly enough to nudge their `betters' toward independence and social upheaval. Their goal was not an autonomous Britain in America, but rather a new kind of social contract. They were the first founders of the Sons of Liberty, the first to boycott and disrupt the colonial administrations -- especially the courts -- and they were the first to take up arms, as `regulators' and as rebellious militia, well before the Continental Congress authorized a regular army. Nash writes: ""For those in the lower echelons of colonial society, elementary rights and social justice, rather than the protection of property and constitutional liberties, were the promises of the revolution.""

The lowest echelons, of course, were slaves, former slaves, and the fairly large number of indigenous peoples who lived amid the colonists of Anglo-European heritage. Their participation in the Revolution was divided, rightfully contingent upon which side seemed most likely to share some of benefits of victory. Both the British and the Americans knew as much. Indians and people of African ancestry fought on both sides and their portions of the struggle were not insignificant. That's a pair of stories which Nash interpolates semi-chronologically in the `unknown' history of the Revolution.

""Who shall write the history of the American Revolution? Who can write it? Who will ever be able to write it?"" wrote Adams to his old rival Thomas Jefferson in 1815. Ironically, among the most influential historians of the Revolution would be Adams's own grandson, who perceived the whole shebang from aloft, from an abiding sense that only the Great make History. In fact, nearly all the most influential historians of the 19th C perceived the Revolution from the perspective of Beacon Hill in Boston. It's taken a major revision of scholarship in recent decades to reveal what sort of motives drove people to be either rebels or loyalists in all the other states, from upper New York to Georgia, with the two most populous states - Pennsylvania and Virginia - experiencing altogether different Revolutions from Massachusetts. That's at the core of Nash's analysis, that there wasn't just one overarching Revolution but rather at least thirteen distinct Revolutions, one in each colonial society, and in most cases a welter of sub-Revolutions, community by community, class by class. And the success of the Big-Story Revolution was perilously contingent on the outcomes of all the more local ones.

In Virginia and in all the states south of Virginia, the paramount consideration of War and Independence was slavery, even though many of the rebel gentry rhetorically denounced the peculiar institution. In his seventh chapter, Nash writes: ""In one of the greatest ironies of the American Revolution, Virginians decided that maintaining their slave property was more important tha fighting the British for independence in the seventh year of the war. If necessary, they would make terms with the British, at least temporarily, rather than see themselves stripped of slaves."" But the bloodiest violence of the Revolution, which had taken place in the South, had always been internecine, colonists against colonists, most often the wealthy Tidewater planters against the slave-poor Piedmont small farmers, who were almost as `underrepresented' in the colonial legislatures as the Colonies were in Parliament. Land hunger -- the desire to seize Ohio Valley and other western lands from the Indians, either as homesteads or for speculation -- was also a stimulus to the desire for Independence.

In Pennsylvania and the other `middle' colonies, Nash reveals, "" the yeoman farmer of revolutionary lore, shouldering his weapon and bidding his family goodbye, was mostly a myth. Mostly landless, drawn from unskilled laborers or lower artisans... and overwhelmingly drawn in service bu bounties provided by those wanting to avoid Continental service ... the majority were foreign-born, and most of them had only recently arrived in North America. ... about 127,000 immigrants had poured into the colonies between 1760 and 1775 . Most hailed from Scotland, Ireland, and England, but about 20,000 came from Germany." At times, in fact, Washington's army barely spoke English. Much of the frontline fighting of the American Revolution was not between the settled Americans and the British, but rather Britons against the refugees from Britain, King George's Hessian mercenaries against German Pennsylvanians. Do I need to say that landless immigrants with minimal English probably had different aspirations for the country taht would emerge from the Revolution? But for John Adams, Robert Morris, the Lees of Virginia and other patriots of the `better' classes, they were all `children' who would need to be disciplined once the fighting ceased.

What Nash aims to express, above all, is that the Revolution wasn't the brainchild merely of a corps of brilliant elite 'founders' but rather a ferment of radicalism among people of many different economic situations and social classes, beginning from disaffections in various sites and generating its own local leadership first. Nash's own research on such popular unrest in rural New England in the decade before the 'shot heard round the world' gives the first half of his book considerable authority. If the book has an obvious flaw, it's that Nash tries to keep too many 'balls' in the air, to juggle accounts of quite disparate movements, especially in the second half of his book dealing with the years from 1774 to 1789 and later.

No single book, nor any single historian, can elaborate the whole history of the American Revolution, though Gordon Wood has come closer than most. Nash is completely candid and forthright in acknowledging that he is `supplementing' the history more than revising it, and certainly not replacing it. There's hardly a word in this long, thoroughly fact-bound book about the meetings of the Continental Congresses in Philadelphia. There's even less about the supposedly major battles. If you check the index, you'll find that Thomas Young is mentioned as often as Benjamin Franklin, and more often than all the Lees together. But this is an important book, a text chock full of information and insights that have been ignored far too widely and too long. What Nash reveals, though he makes no reference at all to current events, has the utmost relevance to the polarized politics of the USA today. Do you think you know who the Founding Fathers were, and what they intended with their Indpendence? Well, don't BELIEVE everything you THINK, not at least until you've digested Gary Nash's account of "the Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America."

47 of 71 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars NEW RADICAL HISTORY IS AN OLD STORY, March 5, 2006

By 

Glenn F. Williams Sr. "gfwilliams" (Balltimore, MD) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America (Hardcover)

The author writes in his Introduction "In this book the reader will find, I hope, an antidote for historical amnesia (xvi)." To do so, Nash says that his book aims at "Disinterring these long-forgotten figures from history's cemeteries (xvii)," so the reader will encounter those figures the middle and lower ranks of American society ... [that] remain anonymous (xvii-xviii)." But as much as it is touted as a "new" and "fresh" approach to the "untold" history of the American Revolution, I can only say that this is so much hype.

I was primed by Professor Nash's introductory claims to expect reading some new interpretation of well-known sources, or possibly some ground-breaking research into untapped primary source materials. Instead, I quickly realized that while many of the narratives on eighteenth century America were interesting, there was little that was "new" or "innovative," except his assessment that his interpretation was somehow "radical." In fact, I soon realized that I was familiar with most, if not all, of the people and events he described: so much for being "new."

A look at Nash's source citations will show he has actually done little or no actual "research." Instead, he has produced an analysis of old narrative histories, many of which have been around for decades, as well as some more recently published secondary accounts. Quotations, more often than not, are attributed to other historians, or if historical figures, are "quoted in" other secondary sources. This is how good undergraduate research papers are constructed, but as a published work, it must be described as "analysis," and not a "contribution to the body of historical knowledge." Furthermore, many of the older sources he quotes would otherwise be those of the sort he would criticize.

It reads as if it is written more for other academic historians, rather than to educate a reading public starving for historical narrative. Nash injects "political correctness" into his analysis at the expense of really understanding the era. For example, he never describe the Six Nations of Iroquois as an "Empire," as if only Europeans can be guilty of creating such polities; although they ceded Shawnee or Mingo land claimed by right of conquest to white settlers. In another example, he implies that the captivity of white children and their adoption into Indian societies was somewhat kindly. The murders of the rest of the captives' family or the sense of loss experienced by those surviving the raids are thus minimized. That some of those who refused repatriation may have suffered from an eighteenth century version of "Stockholm Syndrome" is not explored; while those who escaped or accepted repatriation and related not so pleasant experiences in their captivity narratives are ignored or marginalized.

In Chapter 5, "The Dual Revolution," Nash indicates a lack of knowledge or understanding about the military history of the American War for Independence in general, and the war on the frontier in particular. One clue is given in his description of the Wyoming Massacre of 1778, the "grisly story of Tory and Indian brutality," of which he concludes "Modern scholarship supports none of this (255)." Yet, even the Tory commander Major John Butler's report, available in the Sir Frederick Haldimand Papers in the Canadian Archives and British Museum, recorded that the Tory rangers and their Indian allies "took 227 scalps and only five prisoners."

Overall, Nash's account just plainly gets a lot of it wrong!

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Book!, February 7, 2010

By 

Kyle M. Monahan (NY, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America (Mass Market Paperback)

As long as one enjoys history in the slightest sense, they will like this book. Gary B. Nash aims to re-think history in this book, and he does it well. After using this to teach a class, I find that some people are put off by this "people based" approach saying it's too boring. However, for most people this is far from the case. Almost everyone in the class loved it, and the discussion was great!!

I'd suggest buying it if you like American history (or just history) OR human rights (and people's stories).