Robert G. Parkinson. The Common Cause

Robert G. Parkinson’s The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution is a richly researched, well-written book. At the heart of the argument is Parkinson’s narrative of how the leaders of the revolution accomplished the unlikely task of creating enough unity to forge a nation. His thesis operates in a welcome way at the intersection of social, political, and military history. The book’s central characters are printers who jettisoned their ethic of impartiality in favor of overt partisanship. Contemporaries saw their work as vitally necessary to connect developments in one colony to hearts and minds in other colonies. Their narratives were at least as important as physical weapons, Parkinson demonstrates. At the heart of these tales lay the British government’s reliance on Indians, slaves, and mercenaries as auxiliaries. These stories forged a sense of common cause by presenting “compelling heroes and villains” (9), as well as redefining “terms like ‘rebel,’ ‘insurrectionist,’ and ‘traitor’” (20). Thus, while before the war many whites had thought it best to suppress rumors of slave revolt, patriots saw compelling political reasons to broadcast them if they could be linked to British instigation. Parkinson shows that the patriot print network made it so that fear and loathing of the instigated and instigators transcended colonial boundaries and what we would see as nascent sectional divisions. Unity was their abiding goal, and they achieved it in ways that sustained the struggle for independence—and nothing short of independence—across eight years of war.

Aesthetics · Argument (complex analysis) · Art · Declaration of independence · Impartiality · Independence (probability theory) · Literature · Narrative · Nothing · Political science · Politics · Race (biology) · Sociology · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies