The Radicalism of the American Revolution

The Radicalism of the American Revolution

4.04 of 5 stars 4.04  ·  rating details  ·  1,365 ratings  ·  89 reviews
In a grand and immemsely readable synthesis of historical, political, cultural, and economic analysis, a prize-winning historian depicts much more than a break with England. He gives readers a revolution that transformed an almost feudal society into a democratic one, whose emerging realities sometimes baffled and disappointed its founding fathers.
Paperback, 447 pages
Published March 2nd 1993 by Vintage (first published 1991)
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Stephen
This Pulitzer Prize-winning analysis of the American Revolution is among the most engaging, most thought-provoking and most erudite history books I’ve ever read. Nothing dry, parched or plodding to be found here. This is history that reads more like literature and will trap your attention into the folds of its narrative flow like sailor falling into Charybdis.

Mr. Wood, together with David McCullough (John Adams)and Barbara Tuchman (The Guns of August), constitute the ruling council on my shelf...more
James
I gave it five stars just for the breathtaking ambition of the book and the quality of the book's writing. Wood attempts to describe the social order of colonial America, synthesize the intellectual underpinnings of the Revolution and then explain how it turned the previous world upside down. Wood concludes by tracing the changes that he describes into the Jacksonian period in American history. In all honesty, I am going to have to read the book again a few times in order to fully evaluate his a...more
John
Good stuff to ponder. Not the last word on the Revolution or anything, but certainly a fascinating collection of social and cultural history from America circa 1750 to 1820 or so. Wood is arguing against a belief that the American Revolution did not involve a "revolutionary upheaval," and thus, did not involve real change. Since the Americans did not experience a reign of terror, or a Napoleonic dictator, Wood argues that it is easy to underestimate the American Revolution. Really, the whole way...more
Nick
Wood's depiction of the American Revolution is incredibly insightful and appealing to anyone interested in American history. He is able to put the Revolution into the context of the time in which it occurred in a respect that brings the era to life with periodic anecdotes from individuals that lived from the time: whether common man, aristocrat or founding father. The thesis of the work is that the revolution that occured here in the U.S. was much more radical than it has been given credit for....more
Libyrinths
Wood looks at the cultural and sociological background of Colonial America, through the Revolution and a little beyond. He isn't always good about putting things into their larger context, I assume because he presupposes a reader who can do that for herself. But the information he shares, and the pictures he portrays, are some you may not have found elsewhere.

His thesis is that the American Revolution was indeed radical, but at the moment, because of his book, I'm inclined to think the opposite!...more
Joe
May 26, 2010 Joe rated it 4 of 5 stars
Shelves: history
Caveat: While this book is the kind of great history book to tickle a history fan like myself pink, I see it as being too "on subject" to appeal to most general readers. My nutshell review is that it offers a fine three stage analysis of the changes in the American social-political thought process in the years before, during, and after the Revolution. If that sort of thing floats your boat you will love this book. If not, I know very well this one will bore you stiff.

Too bad that last bit, since...more
DoctorM
An excellent study of social attitudes and political concepts in eighteenth-century British North America and how the American Revolution changed the ways in which Americans thought of hierarchy, patronage, personal dependency, "liberty", and the nature of government.

Wood is excellent on the structures of class and economic ties in a pre-industrial, pre-Marxian world, a world where influence and success depended on personal ties and patronage as much as wealth, a world where politics was still...more
Nathan
Wood's thesis - that the American Revolution was essentially a cultural and political metanoia - is not actually so controversial as it might seem. He has no problem proving that, and does so thoroughly and consistently. What this book has more trouble with is building towards a useful conclusion after laying the theoretical groundwork; Wood never quite manages to address the question "So what?" after he has answered the question "What happened?" Still, it's interesting to note that, given the l...more
Anthony Ragan
An excellent social-political history by one of the preeminent historians of the Revolution and Early Republic. Wood's thesis is that the period from 1740 to 1828 (late Colonial to the rise of Jackson) not only was the time of independence from Britain, but also a radical social and political democratization of American society. Rejecting the British model of personal patronage and social status based on birth, the Revolutionary leaders had hoped to create and Enlightenment "Republic of virtue,"...more
Harry Steinmetz
I am almost done with the book and find if fascinating, but occasionally a bit dull. First, the transition from an monarchial society to a republic to a full democracy is well thought out and documented. The over documentation that is implicit in most history books leads to the occasional dullness. It's not bad, but it doesn't hold you interest like a Tuchman book. With most historians, there seems to be a contest to see who can come up with the most details, rather than just the most significan...more
Marc
This is just a great work of political and social history. Wood does a particularly fine job of teasing out the contradictions in various conceptions of "interestedness" and showing how those conceptions--and interestedness in general--dominate the intellectual landscape of the Revolutionary generation and, by extension, how they shaped modern America.

In a nutshell, here's the argument (not that I can do justice to its complexity or the richness of research that supports it): many Founders beli...more
Absurdfarce
Worthy of it's lofty reputation, The Radicalism of the American Revolution describes the massive social shifts that accompanied the political changes wrought by the Revolution. A vast array of contemporary accounts are marshalled to describe the rigidly hierarchical society in place before the war, a society built upon localism, patronage and a semi-aristocratic notion of public service as an obligation of lesiured gentlemen. We then watch each of these pillars torn away as populations move west...more
Brian Anton
In The Radicalism of the American Revolution, published in 1991, Gordon S. Wood writes about the changes of the social hierarchy before, during, and after the United States’ War for Independence. He uses the intellectual school of thought to explain the motivation for the war by explaining the breakdown of the monarchical and patriarchal structure in colonial America, the development of republican thought, and finally the development of democratic thought. Wood uses many sources to explain and p...more
Eric
By the time I finished this book, back in October, I was so tired of Wood’s dry Kashi prose—as Matt memorably put it—that to write a review seemed more than I could bear. Recent reading about the Roman legacy and disaffected Russian gentlefolk has, however, recalled Wood to my thoughts. The Radicalism of the American Revolution was written against a notion of the revolution as essentially conservative. It’s easy notion to hold, for us in a multi-racial democracy. One group of white landowners in...more
Onefinemess
It’s hard for me to rate this book, as it was both incredibly difficult/boring to read, yet it also had some really great information and some angles of looking that things that hadn’t occurred to me yet (such as the way the shift from monarchy to republic to democracy played out in the minds of Americans, and the way the founding fathers felt about their work just a few decades later).

It is definitely not an introductory text – this is part of what made it difficult for me – it really presuppos...more
Paul Donahue
A great read on the revolution from a completely different angle than I've ever read. Wood doesn't write the book chronologically; there are no story arcs, protagonists, etc. It reads like a textbook and as such can get pretty dry. But textbooks can also be fascinating.

When we think of the American Revolution, we think of a war and a political revolution. We were taught that the French Revolution, even though it happened afterward, was the more monumental event because it was a social and societ...more
Larry
Nov 07, 2008 Larry rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: every American
Recommended to Larry by: New York Review of Books
Professor Wood is an emminant historian and has written an insightful work demonstrating that not only was the American Revolution a world political pardigm shift but that the subsequesnt invention of an all new republican democratic society was in itself an even greater and more radical change in society. The post-war destruction of the patronage systems and the then existing aristocracy, coupled with the advent of the personal work ethic and unquenchable desire to improve one's economic positi...more
Craig
Apr 26, 2008 Craig rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: those with a strong interest in the role of history on America today.
Shelves: history, politics
This book does a really good job explaining the dramatic cultural changes prmopted by the American revolution. I came away from this read persuaded by the writer's thesis.

The writer argues that the revolution wasn't strictly a change to the self-rule of democratic government but also a transformation of society. The argument goes that society was composed largely into cultural elites with high manners, learning, and property, and a laboring mass with little learning, a meanness of character, and...more
Xio
From Library Journal


Historians have always had problems explaining the revolutionary character of the American Revolution: its lack of class conflict, a reign of terror, and indiscriminate violence make it seem positively sedate. In this beautifully written and persuasively argued book, one of the most noted of U.S. historians restores the radicalism to what he terms "one of the greatest revolutions the world has ever known." It was the American Revolution, Wood argues, that unleashed the social...more
Caitlin
I don't care what you say in the introduction, Gordon Wood, but not addressing the agency of women and non-whites in the American Revolution leaves your book underwhelming and incomplete. Plus, you drag in republican motherhood at the end, and don't even explain how that developed. Geeze, dude, either flesh it out or don't bring it up at all.

Also, I think he makes a lot of generalizations about deference, democracy, and capitalism, and then says something like "except, of course, in the South" o...more
Sean
"Americans' interpretation of their Revolution could never cease; it was integral to the very existence of the nation. Some found the meaning of the Revolution in the Constitution and the union it had created. Others discovered the meaning in the freedom and equality that the Revolution had produced. But many other Americans knew that such meanings were too formal, too legal, too abstract, to express what most actually experienced in being Americans. In concrete day-to-day terms, invocations of...more
Mark Feltskog
When I reach for superlatives to characterize this magisterial book, my cup simply runneth over. Gordon S. Wood, by now, is a--if not the--major figure in Colonial and Early United States historiography, and this book, while perhaps not his magnum opus (he has recently published a major study titled Empire of Liberty, and surely has more books and articles to produce), it is perhaps the final word on the ideology and social philosophy of those who fomented the American Revolution. Casual readers...more
Toby
Nov 28, 2008 Toby is currently reading it
This book will blow your mind. It's all about the ideological origins of the United States. It really does a good job of combatting presentism. Almost every ideological development at the American Revolution is relevant today. This book concretely illustrates some of the unique paths of white supremacy and capitalism in the United States. That may not be what Gordon Wood intended, but read it for that and you won't be disappointed. This stuff is deep and deeply relevant.
Karen
Certainly an excellent work, and essential reading for a colonial americanist. However, it is not a work without flaws. For a view of the scholarly debate, read the transcript of the Forum "How revolutionary was the Revolution? A Discussion of Gordon S. Wood's The Radicalism of the American Revolution" in the William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., Vol. 51, no 4 (Oct., 1994) pp. 677-716. Historians debating are McGiffert, Appleby, Clark-Smith, Zuckerman, and a rebuttle by Wood.
Ray Stafford
it was an ok read. my only problem was with the argument that the author was trying to make. the ideas that lead to the american were not revolutionary or radical per say. the philosophies on which they based their resolution to revolt were all broadly accepted, mostly taken from John Locke and Thomas Hobbes. the revolution was the result of generations of political thought, much of it British. the ideas that the Americans advanced were not new or revolutionary
Gail Hoskins
Wood makes the point that the founders were influenced by classical Roman and Enlightenment thinking. They wanted a society were an elite (not by virtue of the family that you were born into, but by your own merit) would run the government in a disinterested manner for the good of all. They never imagined the party politics and consumer society that they helped to create and didn't like what they saw starting to happen in their lifetimes.
Heather
This is a pretty good book but I did get kind of bored by the end. It is almost like a quick summary of our founding fathers from George Washington to John Adams to Aaron Burr. Each founding father gets his own little chapter which makes it easier to read and understand.

Gordon S. Wood is a great writer and historian, and he did do some great research for this book but I was not as impressed with it. I expected more.
Lauren
Another book that earns its Pulitzer Prize and then some. I made the mistake of starting this book while in law school, so I ended up reading it off and on over a period of years. Part of why this book took so much time to read is that it is an unbelievably dense tome that requires long stretches of unwavering attention. Dr. Wood covers an enormous amount of material without ever letting it up, yet the book coalesces into a brilliant narrative. While the long stretch of time between starting and...more
Logan
Though I thought Wood was sometimes too kind to American institutions, in a way over-lauding them, I did think that the book shed some interesting social context to the American Revolution. Essentially, Wood was able to highlight the radical differences between American society prior to and following the Revolution, in order to demonstrate the often overlooked and somewhat surprising radicalism of the American Revolution.
Mike F
Good history of the American Revolution and the social changes it brought. NOT a military history, but a look at three stages in the evolution of american society: pre-Revolution when still part of Brit Empire, the vision and behavior of the founders, and finally the popular democracy that the founders did not really envision. Classic primer on American Rev; won Pulitzer
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Gordon S. Wood is Professor of History at Brown University. He received the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for History for The Radicalism of the American Revolution and the 1970 Bancroft Prize for The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 .
More about Gordon S. Wood...
The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different The American Revolution: A History The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787

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