John M. Murrin. Rethinking America

John M. Murrin’s former student Andrew Shankman notes in introducing this collection of some of Murrin’s influential essays that “none of the thirty-three essays [in The Oxford Handbook of the American Revolution (2012)] dealt with the ideological world recovered by Bailyn, Wood, and Pocock and that had played such a vital part in Murrin’s radical, imperial, Whig synthesis.” In fact, Murrin bemoans at more than one point in this book that scholars of early American history virtually all essentially ignore the question of the American Revolution’s cause(s). As late as 2007, he doubted he would assign a graduate seminar on the subject any book published more recently than 1979 (384). Andrew Shankman tells us of Murrin’s influential essays that, when the two met in 1992, Murrin had published “over forty, perhaps more than fifty,” though “nobody seemed to know for sure” (x). Some have appeared as journal articles, others as pieces in edited collections, and still more as unpublished addresses. Rethinking America: From Empire to Republic includes eleven of them.

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