Essay Database

The Revolution was more than just a war for independence from Great Britain. It also was a struggle to define what the new nation would be by framing instruments and institutions of government, revising the laws of the individual states, and policing the loyalties of the American people. First, the Americans wrote new state constitutions to replace their former colonial charters and to restore legitimate government deriving its authority from the people. They thus made …

…of the Revolution , who wished to preserve an elitist politics of republican leaders benevolently guiding the "common sort." Wood's critics fault his work for discounting or overlooking continuing American social, political, and legal discrimination against African- Americans, Indians, and women; Wood responds that he rightly stresses the distinctive democratization of America by contrast with the rest of the Western world rather than judging the Americans of the Revolutionary generation by the standards of the 1990s.