American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804 by Alan Taylor
My rating: 4 of 5 stars If You Think America is Polarized Now… In American Revolutions: A Continental History 1750 to 1804 (2016) Alan Taylor relates the events and situation in the colonies and the world leading up to the Revolutionary War, the progress of the eight-year conflict, and the aftermath and influence of the revolution on the continent and the world. Taylor casts a broad focus, going deepest into American topics but not ignoring global ones (the Revolutionary War was part of a world war). He reveals things like the elite founders of the USA fearing too much democracy and liberty for common people and not wanting any for blacks or Indians, and the very contingent nature of the US success in the war, depending at key points on bad decisions by British generals, vital help from Spain and especially France, stalwart leadership from George Washington, plenty of patriot propaganda and public acts of “theatrical humiliation” like tar and feathering, plenty of white unity at the expense of Native Americans and African Americans, etc. He exposes how the USA was born with greedy, hypocritical, and thuggish behavior, violence (house burning, mob mayhem, lynching, etc.), political division, conflict between states’ power and the State’s power, etc., and with consciously strengthening white supremacy to bridge class division. He demonstrates how un-unified the revolution was, with the colonies divided among loyalists, patriots, and waverers, as well as slaves and Indians. Taylor has an eye for the complexity of “our contradictory revolutionary history.” I had been vaguely aware of such things before, but Taylor’s book makes them vividly convincing and introduces some elements that were new to me, like the importance of westward expansion into Indian lands as a key driver of the Revolution and of the post-Revolution growth of the USA, with Washington and Jefferson and other slave-owning founders being involved in land speculation, as well as the proliferation of evangelical Christianity, the relation of the continental colonies to those of the West Indies, the relatively low taxes that so outraged the leaders of the Revolution (“We won't be their negroes”), and the post-Revolution worsening of the slave system in the south and the environment for free blacks in the north. Some of the best touches come when Taylor explains how early divisions (states vs. the State, elites vs. commoners, whites vs. blacks/natives, Federalists vs. Republicans, established churches vs. evangelical churches, etc.) are still with us today: “Like a kaleidoscope we continue in every generation to make new combinations of clashing principles derived from the enduring importance and incompleteness of our revolution. The revolution remains embedded in selective memory in every contemporary debate.” Other memorable parts occur when Taylor points out the hypocrisy of the war for liberty (“In the name of Liberty, Patriots suppressed free speech, broke into private mail, and terrorized their critics”) and the roles played and lives led by people usually given short shrift in histories of the Revolution, like women, blacks, and Indians. Taylor writes clean and clear prose punctuated with occasional outstanding witty lines (e.g., “’He [George Washington] possessed the gift of silence,’ said John Adams, who did not”), and he incorporates plenty of quotations from (mostly) the men who lived and made and recorded the history. He brings history and its people and events to life and evokes suspense even when the reader generally knows what’s going to happen. I liked his War of 1812 book The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832 (2013) and this one as well. The audiobook, of course, lacks the illustrations, maps, notes, and bibliography of the physical book. The audiobook reader mark Bramhall is fine, but presumably in an attempt to inject excitement and character into the history as well as to make it easier for the listener to know when Taylor is quoting someone, Bramhall assumes rather hokey British or Irish or German or French or Spanish accents and slightly pompous attitudes when he's reading quotations. Otherwise, he does a good job reading the book. Taylor opens his history with a devastating summary and explication of Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story “My Kinsman Major Molineux” (1832), and he closes his book with a provocative quotation from the story: “May not a man have several voices, Robin, as well as two complexions?” View all my reviews
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