Essays written over the past thirty years assess the American Revolution's abstract and specifically contemporary importance and study factors and events seen as contributing directly to American independence and a national consciousness.

Essays written over the past thirty years assess the American Revolution's abstract and specifically contemporary importance and study factors and events seen as contributing directly to American independence and a national consciousness.

In The Challenge of American History, Louis Masur brings together a sampling of recent scholarship to determine the key issues preoccupying historians of American history and to contemplate the discipline's direction for the future. The fifteen summary essays included in this volume allow professional historians, history teachers, and students to grasp in a convenient and accessible form what historians have been writing about.

This volume presents an eminent historian's progress over thirty years in trying to understand the American Revolution. Here is the historian at his best—beginning with the assumption that things are not always as they appear to be, delighting in the discovery of the previously unknown, and offering new interpretations with style, wit, and the good sense to know that there are always more questions to be answered. The Revolution is fertile ground for the historian's craft, as these essays attest. Edmund S. Morgan discovers in American protests against British taxation an affirmation of rights that the colonists adhered to with surprising consistency, and that guided them ultimately to independence. Then, after a general reassessment of the importance of the Revolution, he moves to a study of it as an intellectual movement, which challenged the best minds of the period to transform their political world. Next, in studying the ethical basis of the Revolution, Morgan traces the shaping of national consciousness by puritanical attitudes toward work and leisure. This leads him to an exploration of the paradoxical relationship between slavery and freedom, and the role their relationship played in the Revolution. Finally, thinking about the Revolution on its anniversary, Morgan looks once again at the Founding Fathers and the innovative daring, admiring most their ability to reject what had hitherto been taken for granted.

In this book, the author gives a persuasive argument to capture the vision of founders to provide for practical tho limited representation of the populace. Democracy in America is being subverted by the rise of a plutocracy, in which Washington insiders play special interest in politics to get their piece of the pie. In the process, they sell out Main Street to bail out Wall Street. How can government by the people be restored in America? A nearly forgotten proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution, a gift handed down by the Founders in the after-glow of the American Revolution, offers a simple way to dilute the concentration of power in Washington and make the government responsive to the will of the people. This book is a call to action for Americans willing to rise to the challenge of winning the American Revolution.