Pauline Maier - Böcker

The “old revolutionaries” were Samuel Adams, Isaac Sears, Thomas Young, Richard Henry Lee, and Charles Carroll, five men of widely varying backgrounds who played significant roles in the American Revolution. What motivations brought these different men together and made them decide to join the movement for Independence? In telling their stories, Pauline Maier explores the American Revolution not so much as a collective movement as a commitment to an ideal republic—which different people interpreted differently. Pauline Maier has written a new Introduction to the Norton paperback edition, in which she discusses the Old Revolutionaries’ pertinence to current debates over liberalism in the American Revolution. Professor Maier teaches history at MIT and is also the author of From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765-1776.

In this classic account of the American revolution, Pauline Maier traces the step-by-step process through which the extra-legal institutions of the colonial resistance movement assumed authority from the British. She follows the American Whigs as they moved by stages from the organized resistance of the Stamp Act crisis of 1765 through the non-importation associations of the late 1760s to the collapse of royal government after 1773, the implication of the king in a conspiracy against American liberties, and the consequent Declaration of Independence. Professor Maier's great achievement is to explain how Americans came to contemplate and establish their independence, guided by principle, reason, and experience.