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A People's History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence

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Intergenerational conflict, gender role upheaval, pacificism and resistance, militarization of children. . . .In 1776 as today, these issues pervaded the lives of ordinary people caught up in the struggles of a small colony locked in conflict with a much larger power. Luckily for us, Howard Zinn, author of the People's History of the United States, has chosen to launch his New Press People's History series with Ray Raphael's A People's History of the american Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence. Now we can see those times through the eyes of the ordinary people making the daily choices that created history. Readers familiar with Ray's earlier works have long appreciated his skill at blending the pithy interviews and reliable scolarship that are the best expression of oral history. Looking at the paintings and woodcuts reproduced on the cover of this book, I wondered "Well, how's he going to pull this one off? Seances with some long dead water boy or camp follower?" No need to fear, this is not a frustrating docu-fantasy with scattered facts embedded in imagined dialogue, but a deeply researched volume in which the rarely heard voices of natives, women, slaves, loyalists and religious abstainers are revealed in their own words. In a time when literacy was the possession a few, lasting traces of the ordinary folk were rare and faint, and a whole new and complex landscape of the Revolutionary period opens when we hear what they have to say. Their words in every case enlarge, and often refute, the commonly held beliefs of both "establishment" and "counterculture" history. Read the words of women left to maintain farms and send supplies to the front, of the men who were jailed for failing to submit to the draft or buy a substitute, of the native people whose own complex politics were derailed by the white men's war. Set in a narrative that gives us the historic context without muting the voices of the people who speak to us directly, this book brings history home to the reader's heart and head.

Most history of the American Revolution focuses on "the founding fathers" and particular events. Ray Raphael's book, the first in a Howard Zinn series, gives credit to everyday people and seldom told events. Adams, Jefferson, Washington et al would have hardly been able to found a country without the massive support of the anonymus masses.

Most impressive about Rapahel's book is that he allows the facts to do the talking. Many authors argue a case but haardly bother to back it up, not Raphael. Equally important, the book is a good read. Some history books with a series of stories become tedious, but Raphel's writing is crisp as he weaves incidents together.

The book also exposes the violent, viscious nature of people, with tarring and feathering and other public humiliations regularly doled out to citizens out of favor in their community. We are reminded that while the common folks were heroes of the Revolution, they were hardly saints in the way they carried out retribution and their perception of justice.

But the primary contribution of the book is to give a fuller more honest view of the American Revolution, how it could happen and who deserves credit, besides those familiar figures so prominent in American text books.

This book continues in the Howard Zinn tradition of trying to focus on groups of people and causes that are not necesarily part of the mainstream. Though not as well written and researched as People's History of the United States, Raphael does do a good job of telling about how different groups saw and participated in the American Revolution. There is plenty of important information such as the large numbers of people in pacifist religious groups like the Quakers and German protestant groups like the mennanites and shakers who were against all war because all the fighting they had seen in Europe through the centuries. It also deals with groups like Native Americans, African Americans and women. These groups were not treated as whole members of society before or after the revolution (not to say that their condition would have improved under continued English rule) so it was interesting to see their involvement and opposition to their war. In addition, the book deals with fronteir groups that suppored American independence, not just northern merchants or southern plantation owners that we are more familiar with.

Raphael's goal is an admirable one, and his topic is of great importance to any study of the American Revolution. Indeed, the "common people" (including women, slaves, and Indians) are too often overlooked in histories of the period, and their roles were critical. For example, the HUGE influence slaves had on how the war was fought in the South is sadly ignored, despite the fact that no understanding of that aspect is complete without it. That said, the book is not the whole story and is best read in combination with a work focusing on the "great men" and events "at the top"--perhaps Gordon Wood or Bernard Bailyn. Such a combination, I think, would provide a fuller portrayal. My major complaint with the book is its inclusion of page upon page of source material. I understand that for some this is a strong point of the work and that Raphael is trying to let these common folk speak for themselves. But the extraordinarily long quotations (sometimes pages in length) prevent Raphael's own voice and analysis from coming through. And in my opinion, the lengthy quotations from secondary sources could have been eliminated and summarized. He would have been well advised to limit the direct quotations and focus on a more in-depth analysis. After all, if one wanted to read straight primary sources, there are collections of documents available. But these flaws notwithstanding, the book deserves a read, if only to fill in the gaps left by high school history courses.

What great news to hear that Howard Zinn and the New Press are creating a "People's History" series!

Even better news is the outstanding job Ray Raphael has done of this first effort in that series. He has taken on the overall approach of the 'original', Zinn's "People's History of the United States" and applied it to the "creation myths" of our country in a way that creates real history which is captivating even as it strips the gloss from the schoolboy history handed on for generations.

The really nice thing is that Raphael has accomplished this with a voice that is unique to himself and to this book. No mere expansion of a chapter from the earlier Zinn book, this. Even having read Zinn's book, I found that this one retained the same ability to amaze me with fundamental reexamination of core beliefs.

At its center this book is, more than anything else, a study of how revolution happens. As such it is important reading for anyone who considers how fundamental change might happen in this country, if ever, again. The real myth of our history is not so much the focus on individual heroics or great battles as the implicit claim that our revolution fell into place so neatly, so quickly. Somewhere between chapters 3 and 5 in our history books the Brits passed some taxes, the Colonists rose up in righteous indignation, the battle was at hand - then won.

Raphael demonstrates at length, through original sources created by regular folks, that the whole business was much longer work than that. People don't just rise up overnight, casting off habits of mind and cultural expectations of what can and cannot be done. People don't just sit down and pen some pamphlets or high-sounding declarations and raise armies.

This book shows how, over decades, a broad sweep of reaction against oppressive institutions by everyday people built a solid groundwork which meant that the final "revolution" was neither unexpected nor un-practiced. He describes how many earlier uprisings, revolts, and proto-revolutions radicalized the populace and eroded assumptions about rights of elites. He describes how the vast majority of disenfranchised poor played a fundamental role in shifting those assumptions.

Throughout he reminds us of what a complicated business it was. From the broad in scope - the impossibility of raising a standing army from reluctant and other-committed farmers and family men, (and the consequential injection of a military draft and a messy cash-buyout business) to the narrow - why the "tea party" energized so many common folk to whom tea was the ultimate class icon.

Thoughtful people have learned to be skeptical of delivered history. But it really helps to have something real to counterbalance mere skepticism. This history is real, this is eye-opening stuff, this is the rest of the story.

This is a remarkable book; it is new in an important way. Raphael has succeeded in looking at the American Revolution through the eyes of common people - farmers, American Indians, Black slaves, enlisted soldiers and others. The stories told from these perspectives are different from each other and very different from any of the histories that revolve around the great men of the Revolution. What makes this book so compelling is that Raphael tells his characters' own stories rather than using them as props for his particular reading of the Revolution. But his book shows nevertheless that the common people's Revolution was at the core of the transformations wrought by the War of Independence. So we have a new way to understand the Revolution; a powerful way to do history; and a series of marvelous tales told by a terrific story teller. I loved it.

This is the first in a series of a books guided by renowned left-wing historian Howard Zinn which seek to tell the people's history of the various eras of American History. And there is a real need for a synthesis of left-wing scholarship on the American Revolution to contrast with the excessively military focus of Robert Middlekauf's The Glorious Cause, and Gordon Wood's The Radicalism of the American Revolution. This book, unfortunately, is not it. It has little original research, largely consisting of a few contemporary newspapers, and it is heavily reliant on a few works of scholarship. More important, the focus is limited. That Raphael did not feel the need to provide a narrative of the American Revolution from the Stamp Act Crisis to the ratification of the American Constitution is his privilege. Instead, he has separate chapters on rebels, soldiers, women, loyalists and pacifists, Native Americans and African Americans. We have many anecdotes of the difficult struggles these people had, and it is noteworthy that Raphael emphasizes female passivity and unenthusiasm and provides a sympathetic picture of the loyalist and pacifist minority. I think the one useful thing I learned from this book was that John Adams' oft-cited quotation that a third of Americans were pro-revolution, a third were against it and a third were neutral was not made about the American Revolution, but the French one. But there is a lack of real analysis. Many of the anecdotes go on and on, giving the book a cut and paste feel.

Moreover there is the rather bland populism of the conclusion ("The people of the Revolution had become players." The rather bland and pompous liturgy on p. 301 starting "People make history, complex human beings from varying circumstances who pull together, drive apart, and interact in countless ways.") It reminds of what is missing in this account. There is no real discussion of the Revolution's origins, nor is there much on the economy. There is no engagement with Michael Merrill's argument that the American colonies were not really capitalist at all, nor with Timothy Breen's theory that the revolution marked the triumph of a consumerist revolution. What were the living standards of the people before the revolution, or after it? How did they live? What was the economic impact of the Revolution? There is little or nothing on ideology. The whole question of republicanism and the sprouting of democratic theory, the concurrent rise of abolitionism and an explicitly racist logic to slavery, there is no clear discussion of these issues. There is scandalously little on religion. The largest discussion deals with the pacifist sects whose opposition to war put them in conflict with the revolutionary authorities. But once again there is nothing on popular religiosity and popular indifference. While there is much on struggle and conflict, there is little on politics, on political organization or such political questions as civil liberties. Finally, there is not enough on the consequences of the revolution. Was the revolution ultimately conservative? Was the revolution sui generis, or part of an unfolding modernity? Was it comparable to the French Revolution or was it fundamentally dissimilar? Again, Raphael provides no answers and we have to ask ourselves whether this series of People's History is going to collapse into a sentimental populism.

This author is a deciple of Howard Zinn, which means one should be under no illusions as to what they shall find in this book. For one this is not a military history of the Rev War. This is social history, with a decided agenda to pursue. This is all well and good, but many of the author's references to military events suffer from a basic lack of knowledge on these aspects of the conflict. The problem with social/political historians is that they deliberately want to disregard any kind of military perspective in their works, to cover what they consider to be more important issues. But when you are dealing with a military subject like the Rev War, you can't help having some of your story effected by these aspects of the history. This is where the author should have versed himself better, because his narrative suffers from simplistic military observations of the conflict as a whole.

There is value in a work like this to be sure despite the selected nature of the research. The author shows very cleverly that many who proposed the Revolution in the first place were not the ones who actually fought it. Many older works have brought this issue up before, perhaps not as deliberately as the the Howard Zinn school of revisionist history would like, but many studies of Washy's army clearly shows that most were the landless, rootless sort which contained many Blacks. So no big discovery there.

The author does point out that in many ways the Rev War was the first big American con job! Liberty was in the air, but it did not include, women, blacks or Indians. There is much truth in this observation, but the danger of looking at past events with too much contemporary outlook tends to pass unfair moral judgements on those people and events. The American Revolution needs to be studied within the confines of its own time and place. Once you start accusing the past of not living up to the supposed standards of the present, you run the risk of passing unfair judegment. This seems a popular thing to do these days, and there are many revisionist historians out there willing to do just that.

The Howard Zinn school of studying events from the ground up, instead of the top down has merit, but to suggest that we should turn our history upside down in order to achieve this goal threatens to distort just as much in the opposite direction. If you are going to have any idea what was going on in the Revolution, you have to be aware of the Washingtons, Jeffersons etc. To simply look at the Revolution from the perspective of Joseph Plum Martin, or a runnaway slave gives you only a slice of the whole picture. I have always thought that the Revolution has been taught with too much holier than thou emphasis. Books like this are good to provide added detail, but they are not designed to be new standard histories.

The author attempts to be balanced, but the tone of the book steadily becomes more strident with each passing chapter. The final chapter on slavery becomes almost sanctimonious. Does the author really believe that we would learn so much more about the Revolution if we were able to read every slaves'journal about escaping from his master! Most slaves due to circumstances could not even read or write! So where would this treasure trove come from? Literacy was not even common among the soldiery of the period, much less anyone else! To study select groups of any event has merit, but to do so exclusively becomes distortion. The fact remains that the Reolvution was fought mostly by the common white soldiers of the colonies. They were the rootless, riff-raff that comprised all armies of the 18th century. To see it any other way is to bring political aggenda into the study of the period.

Teachers would be mistaken to assign this book as a main text on the American Revolution. One would learn little of the actual events of that conflict if this were the only text consulted. The true value of this book only becomes apparent when studied in comparison to other works about the Revolution. After reading some of the more standard histories this book could serve as a useful supplement. Nothing more. I have given this book three stars because it should not be considered a comprehensive new study on the American Revolution.

Raphael has compiled a first-person account of early America and has the wisdom not to over-editorialize, making this an indisputably factual historical reference. Unlike the sometimes "fairy tale" school books, one learns and feels the anguish of the early settlers as they struggled with strong class distinction, wealth vs poverty, and desperation for the freedoms, traditions (some quite surprising) and culture of America today. One learns intimate details about the lives and values of some of our founding fathers (and mothers) who are undeserving of their elevated place in history, while discovering some whose sacrifices and courage made our independence achievable. Here's an example: The Boston Tea Party was not as much about "taxation without representation" as it was about the working class rebelling against the wealthy who were the only ones who could afford to buy tea for their snooty tea parties....and therein began the tradition in America to offer coffee to house guests rather than tea. Here's another example: "tar and feather" punishment didn't originate in the south as a racial issue. You will be surprised at some of the recognizable names who were the target of this public humiliation. It's not a book that you "just can't put down", but one that you won't want to toss out of your library.

I really wish this book had been better; there is definitely a need for a book length history of the American Revolution from the "People's History" perspective, but this book doesn't cut it. The book is basically a compilation of loosely organized notes and anecdotes from secondary sources on the American Revolution. This book would have redeeming value if the author had either done some significant primary source work or done a good job of stringing together past research into a coherent narrative, but he fails to do either. This book best serves as a bibliography for "People's History" of the American Revolution, but not as a good work in itself.