Liberalism and the American Revolution

Bibliographic Data

ID5803071
AuthorsJoyce Appleby (corresponding author)
Year1976
Volume49
Issue1
Pages3-3
Publication date1976-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe New England Quarterly (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0028-4866 • E-ISSN: 1937-2213
PublisherThe MIT Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.2307/364554
OpenAlexW2318489491
LanguageEN
Citations received13

T HE specific problem confronting historians of the American Revolution is to explain that event without relying upon the assumptions embedded in the revolutionary legacy. The heirs of a revolution are at a disadvantage, for they have received the revolutionary tradition as a set of unexamined assumptions. The fact that men would resort to the violent overthrow of their government for personal liberty is such an assumption. The preeminent place which the founding fathers gave to individual freedom has been accepted as natural, and if the principles set forth in the Declaration of Independence have not always been taken as self-evident truths, they have rarely been approached as radical ideas requiring explanation. This does not mean that the historiography of the American Revolution has remained where George Bancroft left it. For forty of the two hundred years of writing on the subject, powerful currents of European thought interrupted the tendency to examine American events within a closed cultural context. However, the Progressive historians' effort to interpret liberal ideology as a mask behind which diverse economic groups struggled for power, foundered on the rock of specific proof. More enduring as a challenge to the Whig explanation

Classical liberalism · Declaration · Declaration of independence · Historiography · Independence · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American History and Culture · Race, History, and American Society

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