This small book, first published in 1926, is comprised of three lectures on the American Revolution considered as a Social Movement, which were delivered by renowned historian and author J. Franklin Jameson in November 1925 on the Louis Clark Vanuxem foundation. In the fourth and final chapter, Jameson sums up and provides thoughts in conclusion. Proving to be an influential publication, the book expresses themes that Jameson had been developing since the 1890s, and which reflected the “Progressive” historiography. It downplays ideas and political values and stresses that the Revolution was a fight over power among economic interest groups, especially as to who would rule at home. “This is a small but highly significant book by one of the first scholars of America...A truly notable book, this is, carefully organized, cut with a diamond point to a finish, studded with novel illustrative materials, gleaming with new illumination, serenely engaging in style, and sparingly garnished with genial humor.”—CHARLES A. BEARD “...stands as a landmark in recent American historiography, a slender but unmistakable signpost, pointing a new direction for historical research and interpretation...The influence of this little book with the long title has grown steadily...With the passage of a quarter-century, the book has achieved the standing of a minor classic. One will hardly find a textbook that does not paraphrase or quote Jameson’s words, borrow his illustrations, cite him in its bibliography.”—FREDERICK B. TOLLES in The American Historical Review “The scholarship is impeccable, the style is polished, and, above all, the outlook is broad and thoughtful...The author has a keen eye for relationships which might easily be neglected.”—ALLAN NEVINS

Written when political and military history dominated the discipline, J. Franklin Jameson's The American Revolution Considered as a Social Movement was a pioneering work. Based on a series of four lectures he gave at Princeton University in 1925, the short book argued that the most salient feature of the American Revolution had not been the war for independence from Great Britain; it was, rather, the struggle between aristocratic values and those of the common people who tended toward a leveling democracy. American revolutionaries sought to change their government, not their society, but in destroying monarchy and establishing republics, they in fact changed their society profoundly. Jameson wrote, "The stream of revolution, once started, could not be con.ned within narrow banks, but spread abroad upon the land.? Jameson's book was among the first to bring social analysis to the fore of American history. Examining the effects the American Revolution had on business, intellectual and religious life, slavery, land ownership, and interactions between members of different social classes, Jameson showed the extent of the social reforms won at home during the war. By looking beyond the political and probing the social aspects of this seminal event, Jameson forced a reexamination of revolution as a social phenomenon and, as one reviewer put it, injected a "liberal spirit" into the study of American history. Still in print after nearly eighty years, the book is a classic of American historiography.

The observations made by J. Franklin Jameson in his pathbreaking study initiated a challenging and enormously productive scholarly debate regarding the nature of the Revolutionary era in American history. For more than six decades questions involving the social implications of the struggle for independence have continued to intrigue historians, and their explorations of the Revolutionary experience from the perspective Jameson suggested have produced a rich and varied literature. The essays featured in this volume demonstrate the ongoing vitality and importance of contemporary scholarship on the social character of the American Revolution.