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Title: The American Revolution: Revised Edition by Edward Countryman ISBN: 0-8090-2562-0 Publisher: Hill & Wang Pub. Date: 01 January, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 2.57 (7 reviews)
Rating: 2
Summary: Unconvincing for an outsider
Comment: I was looking for a compact and conscise book on early American History as an outsider with an interest and relatives in America, without any advice. I browsed many reviews on amazon and went into bookstores in the US.
Partly, I got what I wanted, the book is non-technical, can be read without wide background knowledge. However, it is utterly boring, and not very well edited: the obsession to keep a chronological order makes understanding less than more easy.
The books arguments are not convincing for me. First of all, the author makes no reference on the methodology he chooses his arguments, sources, an underlying theory behind his convictions, and even in such a genereal interest book it worths mentioning in a preface or at least in footnote. The book makes some sweeping claims on a probably vulgarized Marxist social theory with materialistic economic forced at work behind the Framers, but probably it is just some unreflected common sense with a bias. The forces at work are not convincing, the argument for a European reader is one of the we-saw-many-such-narratives.
The book tries to follow the trend and include all people, regardless of race, origin, gender, etc in the great story, however, it is just misguided political correctness, in fact I did not learn anything about the Indians, black people or women in the examined period.
The highest point in the essay is the emphasised problem of the breaking up of the British identity in the ex-colonies and the different social and institutional forms of the would be United States before the federation. This is very valuable and interesting, again, not very deep: I just grasped the significance and the excitement but I did not get a credible narrative. I do not understand how the British identity vanished and the Amercian emerged. Coming from a country with over a 1000 years of recorded history, continous identity crisis and reading the book in the year of the European Convent that drafted our constitution I am very sensitive to this issue and find Countryman's account very shallow.
There is one invaluable part in the book that made it a good deal for me: the bibliographical notes that give a very brief, again chronological overview of the history of American history-writing. It will help me choosing another one to better understand the American Revolution.
Rating: 4
Summary: Not that bad actually
Comment: Contrary to Mr Randolph's and Marina's opinions, I found this book to be well-written and very readable - and I'm in fact reading it for my first course in the history of the Revolution, although it wasn't recommended by the lecturer!
Certainly the book doesn't contain as much new research as some scholars would expect, and is instead a synthesis of previous work on different aspects of the period (as Countryman's Acknowledgements and Bibliographical Essay suggest). That includes his own research on New York that won the Bancroft Prize in 1982.
If you're uncomfortable with the lack of footnotes, Countryman isn't the only one to do this. John Fairbank did the same with some of his books on China (but of course you'll reply that Fairbank was a giant in his field). In any case, most of Countryman's facts can be verified by referring to earlier works in this field. His assertion about pre-marital pregnancies was borrowed from Robert Gross' "The Minutemen and their world", where the proper statistics are included in detail.
If you find jumps in chronology and unconventional details distracting, that would rule out much of the fine historical writing of the last 40 years, wouldn't it? Countryman was aiming for a thematic, rather than purely narrative, history of the Revolution, and military history was secondary to his argument - hence the sparse attention paid to it. Personally, I'm glad I got this book as it's a lively and stimulating read for anyone new to the subject - unless you love reading footnotes, that is.
Rating: 1
Summary: A disappointing book with a misleading title.
Comment: I found this book to be horrible. It puzzles me how this book could be a product of a professor of history. His chief failings are as follows: (1)He fails to use footnotes. I find this to be inexcusable for a serious scholar. He wrote a number of things, for example, that I found to be unbelievable, but because of his failure to provide proper citations, I was unable to follow up and double check him on his work. Just one example: he wrote on page 22 that "50 percent of eighteenth-century New England brides .. were pregnant at their wedding[.]" This is not something that could be known without extensive research. I'm not aware of any statistical surveys or census information that could verify such a claim. I don't think this kind of information would be found in church marriage records. Did someone do an exhaustive study of personal diaries and make a statistical inference? Academic protocol demands a proper citation, and he provided none. (2)His organization was lacking. This is a time period in which I have recently completed a number of readings, and yet I, at times, had a difficult time following where he was going, or ultimately what point he was trying to make. At least I understood many of the specifics of events he alluded to, but a reader unfamiliar with the events would be lost. In my opinion, he lumped too many things together, causing the reader to feel at various times like he was jumping all around chronologically and geographically and, at times, topically. (3)I think the title of the book is misleading. It is less a history and more an essay on how the author views the interplay between the political events of the day and the social dimensions. Many of his points were lost on me. For example, he develops the idea that early Americans lived in a violent world. Well, so? Who didn't know this? Violence pervades most of history. If I were his editor, I would have tried to get the author to focus more on what he was trying to do with this book. Did he want the book to be a history book, a social essay, or what? Anyone wanting to gain a fundamental history of the time period would be well advised to avoid this book. Finally, I hate to be so negative for there is some good content, but I would only read this book if you are already well read on this time period and have nothing better to do, or if you are a professional academician with interest in this field. And for those of you who teach a history course on the American Revolution, please don't inflict this book on your students. For those who do not fall into those two categories above and you would like to read good history on the American Revolution, I recommend the following: for the period up to and including 1776, Merrill Jensen's "The Founding of a Nation," for the time period of the Articles of Confederation, Merrill Jensen's "The New Nation," and for the Constitutional Convention, Forrest McDonald's "Novus Ordo Seclorum" and Catherine Drinker Bowen's "Miracle at Philadelphia." I am not well read enough on the war itself to make a good recommendation.
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Title: Colonies to Nation, 1763-1789: A Documentary History of the American Revolution by Jack P. Greene ISBN: 0393092291 Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: 01 June, 1975 List Price(USD): $29.85 |
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Title: The American Revolution: A History (Modern Library Chronicles) by Gordon S. Wood ISBN: 0679640576 Publisher: Modern Library Pub. Date: 22 January, 2001 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: The Minutemen and Their World (American Century Series) by Robert A. Gross ISBN: 0809001209 Publisher: Hill & Wang Pub. Date: 01 April, 1976 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Race and Revolution by Ga Nash ISBN: 0945612214 Publisher: Madison House Pub. Date: 01 December, 1990 List Price(USD): $21.95 |
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Title: The Challenge of the American Revolution by Edmund Sears Morgan ISBN: 0393008762 Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: 01 March, 1978 List Price(USD): $10.65 |
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