The American Revolution
Revisions in Need of Revising
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3284423 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Edmund S Morgan (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1957 |
| Volume | 14 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 3 |
| Publication date | 1957-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The William and Mary Quarterly (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0043-5597 • E-ISSN: 1933-7698 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/1917368 |
| OpenAlex | W2046749827 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 7 |
URING the past fifty years three ideas have inspired research into the history of the eighteenth century in America and England. 'The earliest of these to appear, and the most fruitful of results, was the idea that American colonial history must be seen in the setting off the British Empire as a whole. We are all familiar today with the new insights and new discoveries that have grown out of this view: the great works of George Louis Beer and Charles McLean Andrews, the monumental synthesis of Professor Lawrence Gipson, which now approaches its culmination. This has been a great idea, and it has done more than any other to shape our understanding of the colonial past. A second idea, which has affected in one way or another most of us who study colonial history, is thai the social and economic divisions of a people will profoundly influence the course of their history. This idea received early application toAmerican history in Carl Becker's study of New York politics on the eve of the Revolution and in Charles Beard's An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution. New York politics before the Revolution, Becker said, revolved around two questions, equally important, the question of home rule and that of who should rule at home.' Subsequent historians have found in Becker's aphorism a good description of the Revolutionary period as a whol4 The conflict between different social groups now looms as large in our histories of the Revolution as the struggle against England. Like all seminal ideas, this one has sometimes been used as a substitute for research instead of a stimulus to it. Historians have been so convinced of the importance of social and economic divisions that they have uttered the wildest kind of nonsense, for example
Political science · American Constitutional Law and Politics · History
| Unique citing works | 7 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,1 |
| Citation span | 1959 - 2023 (65) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 7 |