John M. Murrin - Böcker

For five decades John M. Murrin has been the consummate historian's historian. This volume brings together his seminal essays on the American Revolution, the United States Constitution, and the early American Republic. Collectively, these essays rethink fundamental questions regarding American identity, the reasons why colonists felt compelled to declare their independence, and the myriad ways that the American Revolution produced a profoundly transformative change in those who lived through it. They reconsider questions that have shaped the field for several generations and connect those questions to issues of central interest to historians working today. Collectively, the essays gathered here argue that the great historiographical schools that have long competed to explain the American Revolution must move towards a synthesis that allows the whole to be greater than the parts. The essays show how high politics and the study of constitutional and ideological questions--broadly the history of elites--must be considered in close conjunction with issues of economic inequality, class conflict, and racial division. By bringing together different historiographical schools and a variety of perspectives in both Britain and the North American colonies, Rethinking America explains why what began as constitutional argument that virtually all expected would remain contained within the British Empire exploded into a truly subversive, destructive, and radical revolution that destroyed monarchy and aristocracy and replaced it with a rapidly transforming and wildly pulsing republic. The essays examining the period of the early American Republic discuss why the Founders' assumptions about what their Revolution would produce were profoundly different than the society that emerged from the American Revolution. In many ways, the outcome of the American Revolution put the new United States on a path to a violent and bloody civil war, as is shown by an essay directly comparing the American colonists of 1776 to the Confederate States of America in 1861.A much anticipated work, this volume offers both groundbreaking and timeless analysis of the nation's critical first decades as it moved from empire to republic.

Now in its sixth edition, Colonial America is the most respected and well-known anthology of readings by top scholars in the field of early American history. The collection offers an insightful and critical view of the colonial period, and exposes students to the most significant developments in recent American colonial history scholarship. The new edition features 17 new essays, emphasizing a comparative approach to colonial worlds, with added content on the Atlantic and North American interior. Drawing its material from a greater range of sources than ever before, the text also highlights the themes of race, gender, and family throughout the collection of articles. Colonial America includes: maps of the eighteenth century Atlantic World, West Indies, and British North American colonies new introductions to key essays from the fifth edition seventeen new essays with contextualizing introductions discussion questions for students recent scholarship on Indian-colonial relations, the Atlantic, comparative colonialism, gender, slavery and bound labor, and imperial history.With contributions from: Fred Anderson, T.H. Breen, Anne S. Brown, Denver Brunsman, Colin G. Calloway, Jared Diamond, David Eltis, Aaron S. Fogleman, Alan Gallay, David D. Hall, April Lee Hatfield, Frank Lambert, Barry J. Levy, Kenneth A. Lockridge, Brendan McConville, Peter N. Moogk, Philip D. Morgan, John M. Murrin, Jenny Hale Pulsipher, Martin H. Quitt, Daniel K. Richter, Brett Rushforth, David J. Silverman, Owen Stanwood, John K. Thornton, Alden T. Vaughan, Wendy Anne Warren, and David J. Weber, The sixth edition of Colonial America is the best resource on the market to give students a feel for the newest themes in colonial history, and to leave them with a sense of the conversation shared among early American historians.Stanley N. Katz is Director of the Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He has written widely on political, legal, and constitutional history, and is the Editor in Chief of the Oxford International Encyclopedia of Legal History.John M. Murrin is Professor Emeritus of History at Princeton University. He is co-author of Liberty, Equality, Power: A History of the American People.Douglas Greenberg is Professor of History and Executive Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. David J. Silverman is Associate Professor of History at The George Washington University. He is the author of Red Brethren: The Brothertown and Stockbridge Indians and the Problem of Race in Early America.Denver Brunsman is Assistant Professor of History at Wayne State University. He is the co-editor of Revolutionary Detroit: Portraits in Political and Cultural Change, 1760-1805.