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149 American Revolution Essay Topics & Examples

If you’re looking for American Revolution topics for research paper or essay, you’re in the right place. This article contains everything you might need to write an essay on Revolutionary war

🗽 Top 7 American Revolution Research Topics

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American Revolution, also known as Revolutionary War, occurred in the second half of the 18th century. Among its causes was a series of acts established by the Crown. These acts placed taxes on paint, tea, glass, and paper imported to the colonies. As a result of the war, the thirteen American colonies gained independence from the British Crown, thereby creating the United States of America. Whether you need to write an argumentative, persuasive, or discussion paper on the Revolutionary War, this article will be helpful. It contains American Revolution essay examples, titles, and questions for discussion. Boost your critical thinking with us!

• Townshend Acts and the Tea Act as the causes of the American Revolution
• Ideological roots of the American Revolution
• English government and the American colonies before the Revolutionary war
• Revolutionary War: the main participants
• The American Revolution: creating the new constitutions
• Causes and effects of the American Revolution
• Revolutionary War: the key battles

Signifying a cornerstone moment for British colonial politics and the creation of a new, fully sovereign nation, the events from 1765 to 1783 were unusual for the 18th century. Thus, reflecting all the crucial moments within a single American Revolution Essay becomes troublesome to achieve. However, if you keep in mind certain historical events, then you may affect the quality of your paper for the better.

All American Revolution essay topics confine themselves to the situation and its effects. Make sure that you understand the chronology by searching for a timeline, or even create one yourself! Doing so should help you easily trace what date is relevant to which event and, thus, allow you to stay in touch with historical occurrences. Furthermore, understand the continuity of the topic, from the creation of the American colony until the Declaration of Independence. Creating a smooth flowing narrative that takes into consideration both the road to revolution and its aftereffects will demonstrate your comprehensive understanding of the issue.

When writing about the pre-history of the Revolution, pay special attention to ongoing background mechanisms of the time. The surge of patriotism, a strong desire for self-governed democracy, and “Identity American” all did not come into existence at the Boston Tea Party but merely demonstrated themselves most clearly at that time. Linking events together will become more manageable if you can understand the central motivation behind them.

Your structure is another essential aspect of essay writing, with a traditional outline following the events in chronological order, appropriately overviewing them when necessary. Thus, an excellent structure requires that your introduction should include:

• An American Revolution essay hook, which will pique your readers’ interest and make them want to read your work further. Writing in unexpected facts or giving a quote from a contemporary actor of the events, such as one of the founding fathers, are good hook examples because they grab your readers’ attention.
• A brief overview of the circumstances. It should be both in-depth enough to get your readers on the same level of knowledge as you, the writer, and short enough to engage them in your presented ideas.
• An American Revolution essay thesis that will guide your paper from introduction to conclusion. Between overviewing historical information and interest-piquing hooks, your thesis statement should be on-point and summarize the goal of your essay. When writing, you should often return to it, assessing whether the topics you are addressing are reflective of your paper’s goals.

Whatever issues you raise in your introduction and develop in your main body, you should bring them all together in your conclusion. Summarize your findings and compare them against your thesis statement. Doing so will help you carry out a proper verdict regarding the problem and its implications.

The research you have carried out and the resulting compiled bibliography titles will help you build your essay’s credibility. However, apart from reading up on the problem you are addressing, you should think about reading other sample essays. These may not only help you get inspired but also give excellent American Revolution essay titles and structure lessons. Nevertheless, remember that plagiarizing from these papers, or anywhere else, is not advisable! Avoid committing academic crimes and let your own ideas be representative of your academism.

Want to sample some essays to get your essay started? Kick-start your writing process with IvyPanda and its ideas!

• The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution: Book Analysis Even these facts from the author’s biography make “The Shoemaker and the Tea Party” a reliable source of the knowledge on the American past.”The Shoemaker and the Tea Party” is based on the story of […]
• The American Revolution and Its Effects It is an acknowledgeable fact that the American Revolution was not a social revolution like the ones that were experienced in France, Russia or China, but it was a social revolution that was aimed at […]
• Sex During the American Revolution American Revolution is one of the most prominent and groundbreaking events in the history of the United States of America. One of the most interesting facts from the video was the usage of clothing and […]
• Figures of the American Revolution in «The Shoemaker and the Tea Party» The book The Shoemaker and the Tea Party by Alfred Young is a biographical essay describing events of the 18th century and life one of the most prominent figures of the American Revolution, George Robert […]
• The Unknown American Revolution: Book Review In his book, Gary unveiled that the American Revolution’s chaos was through the power of Native Americans, enslaved people, and African Americans, not the people in power. The book boldly explains the origins of the […]
• Changes Leading to the Colonies to Work Together During the American Revolution Ideally, the two settlements formed the basis of the significant social, political, and economic differences between the northern and southern colonies in British North America.
• American Revolution: Principles and Consequences One expanded the number of lands of the young country due to the confiscation of territories that were under the possession of the English government and loyalists, that is, people supporting the crown.
• The American Revolution’s Goals and Achievements The Patriots’ goals in the War, as well as the achievements of the revolution and the first Constitution in relation to different groups of population will be discussed in this essay.
• Haudenosaunee’s Role in the American Revolution They also signed treaties in relation to the support needed by the Americans and the Indians to avoid the conflicts that arose between the nations.
• Causes and Foundations of the American Revolution Speaking about what led to the revolution in the United States – the Boston Massacre, the Tea Party, or the Stamp Act – the most rational reason seems to be the result of all these […]
• The American Revolution: Role of the French The revolutionary war became the fundamental event in the history of the USA. For this reason, the rebellion in America became a chance to undermine the power of the British Empire and restore the balance […]
• Causes of the American Revolution: Proclamation & Declaration Acts The Proclamation was initially well-received among the American colonists because of the emancipation of the land and the cessation of hostilities.
• The American Revolution and Its Leading Causes Two acts passed by the British Parliament on British North America include the Stamp Act and the Townshend Act, which caused the Boston Massacre.
• A Woman’s Role During the American Revolution Doing so, in the opinion of the author, is a form of retribution to the people long gone, the ones who sacrificed their lives in honor of the ideals that, in their lifetime, promised a […]
• The Battles of the American Revolution The initial cause of the battle is the desire of the British to take over the harbors in Massachusetts. The battle of Bunker Hill marked the end of the peaceful rebellions and protests and became […]
• American Revolution’s Domestic and Worldwide Effects The American Revolution was a world war against one of the world’s most powerful empires, Great Britain, and a civil war between the American Patriots and the pro-British Loyalists. The main domestic effects of the […]
• The Heroes of the American Revolution However, their role was forgotten by the emergence of heroes such as Washington and Adams, white men who reformed the country.
• American Revolution: Seven Years War in 1763 As a result of the passing the Tea Act in 1773 British East India company was allowed to sell tea directly to the colonist, by passing the colonists middlemen.
• The History of American Revolution and Slavery At the same time, the elites became wary of indentured servants’ claim to the land. The American colonies were dissatisfied with the Royal Proclamation of 1763 it limited their ability to invade new territories and […]
• The Experience of the American Revolution One of such events was the American Revolution, which lasted from 1775 to 1783; it created the independent country of the United States, changed the lives of thousands of people, and gave them the real […]
• Causes of the American Revolution Whereas we cannot point to one particular action as the real cause of the American Revolution, the war was ignited by the way Great Britain treated the thirteen united colonies in comparison to the treatment […]
• American Revolution Rise: Utopian Views Therefore, the problem is that “the dedication to human liberty and dignity exhibited by the leaders of the American Revolution” was impossible because American society “…developed and maintained a system of labor that denied human […]
• Impact of American Revolution on the French One After the success of the American Revolution, there was a lot of literature both in praise and criticism of the war which found its way to the French people.
• The Leadership in Book ‘Towards an American Revolution’ by J. Fresia It’s an indication of the misuse of the people by the leaders in a bid to bar them from enlightenment and also keep them in manipulative positions.
• American Revolution Information People in the colonies were enslaved in tyranny of churches as well as monarchies, and Benjamin, believed that with proper undertaking of education, the colonies would arise to their freedom and Independence.
• American Revolution: An Impact on the Nation The American Revolution can be characterized as one of the milestone events in American history which led to the formation of the state and the nation.
• Benjamin Franklin and the American Revolution Radical interpretations of the Revolution were refracted through a unique understanding of American society and its location in the imperial community.
• The American Revolution U.S. History But at the end the pride of the English King as well as the desperation of the English monarchy forced the hand of the settlers to draw the sword.
• The American Revolution From 1763 to 1777 In America 1763 marked the end of a seven-year war which was known as the India and French war and also marked the beginning of the strained as well as acrimonious relations between the Americans […]
• The History of American Revolution The American Revolution refers to a period between1763 and 1784 when the events in the 13th American colonies culminated in independence from the British colonial rule.
• American Revolution: Causes and Conservative Movement To ease workplace stress, managers must be able to recognize the effects of stress on employees and to determine the cause.
• The American Revolution Causes: English and American Views The American Revolution was brought about by the transformations in the American government and society. The taxes were not welcome at all since they brought about a lot of losses to the colonies.
• American Revolution and Its Historical Stages The following paragraphs are devoted to the description of the stages that contributed to a rise of the revolution against British rule.
• The American Revolution and Political Legitimacy Evolution At the beginning of the article, the Anderson highlights Forbes magazine comments where they stated that the businesses that would continue to feature in the future Forbes directory are the ones that head the activists’ […]
• American Revolution: Perspective of a Soldier Revolution became the event that radically changed the American society of that period and, at the same time, contributed to its unification.
• American Revolution and the Current Issues: Course The understanding of the critical issues in the history of the American Revolution will make the students intellectually understand the subsequent wars in American History and the events that may occur later.
• American Revolution in the United States’ History Americans had a very strong desire to be free and form their own government that would offer the kind of governance they wanted.
• Vietnam War and American Revolution Comparison Consequently, the presence of these matters explains the linkage of the United States’ war in Vietnam and the American Revolution to Mao’s stages of the insurgency.
• American Revolution in Historical Misrepresentation Narrating the good side of history at the expense of the bad side passes the wrong information to the students of history.
• American Revolution Against British Power They considered the fashions and customs of the British to be the best in the world; they sent their children to London for education, and they were very proud of the constitutional monarchy that governed […]
• The American Revolution as a People’s Revolution An idealized conception of a revolution leads to the conclusion that the American Revolution was not a representation of a “people’s revolution”.
• Battle of Brandywine in the American Revolution The Squad’s mission is to reconnoiter the location of the enemy during the night before the battle and prevent the possible unexpected attack of the enemy by enhancing the Principles of War.
• African Americans in the American Revolution Both the slave masters and the British colonizers sought the help of the African Americans during the American Revolution. The revolutionary nature of the American Revolution did not resonate with both the free and enslaved […]
• Post American Revolution Period: Washington Presidency The formation of the National Government during the years of 1789-1815 was associated with many challenging situations, and it was characterized by the opposition of the Federalists and Republicans, among which the important roles were […]
• American Revolution: Reclaiming Rights and Powers As a result, British Government Pursued policies of the kind embodied in the proclamation of the 1763 and the Quebec act that gave Quebec the right to many Indian lands claimed by the American colonists […]
• Women Status after the American Revolution This revolution enabled women to show men that females could participate in the social life of the society. Clearly, in the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century women were given only […]
• American Revolution of 1774 First of all, one of the main causes of the conflict and the following confrontation between the British power and the colonies was the disagreement about the way these colonies should be treated and viewed.
• Impact of Rebellion on the American Revolution The rebellion was retrogressive to the cause of the American Revolution because it facilitated the spread of the ruling class and further hardened the position of the ruling class regarding the hierarchical arrangement of slavery.
• Liberty! The American Revolution The thirteen colonies were not strangers to the oppressions and intolerable acts of the British parliament. The oppressions of the colonies by the British became a regular occurrence and the people sought a solution.
• Was the American Revolution Really Revolutionary? The nature of the American Revolution is considered to be better understandable relying on the ideas offered by Wood because one of the main purposes which should be achieved are connected with an idea of […]
• The American Struggle for Rights and Equal Treatment To begin with, the Americans had been under the rule of the British for a very long time. On the same note, the British concentrated on taxing various establishments and forgot to read the mood […]
• African American Soldier in American Revolution It was revealed that the blacks were behind the American’s liberation from the British colonial rule, and this was witnessed with Ned Hector’s brevity to salvage his army at the battle of Brandywine.
• The Revolutionary War Changes in American Society The Revolution was started by the breakaway of the 13 American Colonies from the British Crown. A significant consequence of the American Revolution is that it led to the drafting of the Declaration of Independence […]
• American Revolution and the Crisis of the Constitution of the USA In whole, the American people paving the way to independence have to face challenges in the form of restricted provisions of Constitution, wrong interpretation and understanding of the American Revolution, and false representation of conservative […]
• American Revolutionary War: Causes and Outcomes The colonists vehemently objected to all the taxes, and claimed that Parliament had no right to impose taxes on the colonies since the colonists were not represented in the House of Commons.
• Effects of the American Revolution on Society In order for the women to fulfill, the role they needed to be educated first thus the emphasis of education for them in what came to be known as Republican Motherhood. Women faced limitations in […]
• The Ideas of Freedom and Slavery in Relation to the American Revolution Although many Founders discussed the phenomenon of slavery as violating the appeals for freedom and liberty for the Americans, the concepts of slavery and freedom could develop side by side because the Founders did not […]
• Summary of “Abraham Lincoln” and “The Second American Revolution” by James M. McPherson According to McPherson, the war, that is, the Civil War, was aimed at bringing about liberty and ensuring the extension of protection to the citizenry which he had a clue of the fact that the […]
• French and Indian War, the American Revolution, and the War of 1812 In the course of the war, a peace treaty was signed in 1763 where the Britons acquired most of the territory that belonged to the French.
• The American Revolution and Independence Day Celebration This article will help us understand the American Revolution and determine whether Americans have a reason to celebrate Independency Day every Fourth of July or not, whether all American supported the war, and whether the […]
• American Women and the American Revolution Women’s standing, as much as they, in point of fact, turned out to be narrower and inflexibly defined subsequent to the war, was enhanced.
• Abigail Adams in American Revolution The presidency is a highly celebrated position and in her husband’s capacity, she was elevated to the eyes of the whole nation.
• The American War of Independence The American Revolution denotes the social, political and intellectual developments in the American states, which were characterized by political upheaval and war. The move by the colonizers seemed unpopular to the colonists and a violation […]
• Domestic and Foreign Effects of the American Revolution
• Reasons for English Colonization and American Revolution
• Native Americans During the American Revolution
• The American Revolution: The Most Important Event in Canadian History
• Women’s Rights After the American Revolution
• Philosophical, Economic, Political and Social Causes of the American Revolution
• American Revolution: The Result of Taxation, Military Occupation in the Colonies and the Negligence of the British
• The American Revolution and Women’s Freedom
• Reasons for the American Revolution – Tax, Military Presence, Merca
• Colonial Independence and the American Revolution
• The History, Transformative Quality, and Morality of the American Revolution
• Political and Economic Cause of the American Revolution
• American Revolution and Mexican Independence
• American Revolution: The Result of the French and Indian War
• Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution
• Battles That Changed the Outcome of the American Revolution
• After the American Revolution: Conflicts Between the North and South
• The Reasons Why People Chose to Be Loyalist During the American Revolution
• Identity: American Revolution and Colonies
• The Expansion and Sectionalism of the American Revolution
• The Relationship Between Nova Scotia and the American Revolution
• World Events That Coincided With the American Revolution
• The American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence
• The Republican Ideology and the American Revolution
• The Men Who Started the American Revolution
• Slavery and the American Revolution
• Economic and Political Causes for the American Revolution
• Ideas, Movements, and Leaders in the American Revolution
• American Revolution and the American Civil War
• Cultural Differences, the Ineffectiveness of England’s Colonial Policy, and the Effects of the French and Indian War as the Causes of the American Revolution
• American Democracy, Freedom, and the American Revolution
• Benjamin and William Franklin and the American Revolution
• The Major Factors That Led to the American Revolution
• Labor During the American Revolution
• Finding Stability After the American Revolution
• Autonomy, Responsibility and the American Revolution
• George Washington and the American Revolution
• African Americans and the American Revolution
• British and American Strengths in the American Revolution
• American Revolution and How the Colonists Achieved Victory
• What Was The Catalyst Of The American Revolution?
• Was the American Revolution a Conservative Movement?
• How Inevitable Was the American Revolution?
• Was the American Revolution Inevitable?
• Was the American Civil War and Reconstruction a Second American Revolution?
• How did the French and Indian War shape the American Revolution?
• What Were the Origins of the American Revolution?
• Why Did Tensions Between Great Britain and their North American Colonies Escalate so Quickly in the Wake of the French and Indian War?
• How the American Revolution Changed American Society?
• Was the American Revolution About Freedom and Political Liberty, or Just About Paying Fewer Taxes?
• Why Was American Revolution Unjust?
• How America and Great Britain Benefited from the American Revolution?
• Was The American Revolution A British Loss or An American Victory?
• How Did the American Revolution Impact Concordians, and Americans, not just Physically but Emotionally and Politically?
• Was the American Revolution Moderate or Radical?
• How Radical Was the American Revolution?
• Did the American Revolution Follow the Broad Pattern of Revolutions?
• How Did The American Revolution Affect Slaves And Women?
• How Did the American Revolution Get Started?
• How England Instigated the American Revolution?
• Who Benefited Most from the American Revolution?
• How Did People Contribute to the Political and Grassroots Areas to Gain Support of the American Revolution?
• Was the American Revolution the Fault of the United States or England?
• Was the American Revolution a Genuine Revolution?
• How Did Labor Change After The American Revolution?
• Did The American Revolution Help Spur The French Revolution?
• How Freemasonry Steered the American Revolution and the Revolutionary War?
• How Outrageous Taxation Lead to the American Revolution?
• How American Revolution Affect Natives?
• Is British Oppression: The Cause of the American Revolution?
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Revolutionary War

By: History.com Editors

Updated: August 11, 2023 | Original: October 29, 2009

The Revolutionary War (1775-83), also known as the American Revolution, arose from growing tensions between residents of Great Britain’s 13 North American colonies and the colonial government, which represented the British crown.

Skirmishes between British troops and colonial militiamen in Lexington and Concord in April 1775 kicked off the armed conflict, and by the following summer, the rebels were waging a full-scale war for their independence.

France entered the American Revolution on the side of the colonists in 1778, turning what had essentially been a civil war into an international conflict. After French assistance helped the Continental Army force the British surrender at Yorktown, Virginia, in 1781, the Americans had effectively won their independence, though fighting did not formally end until 1783.

Causes of the Revolutionary War

For more than a decade before the outbreak of the American Revolution in 1775, tensions had been building between colonists and the British authorities.

The French and Indian War , or Seven Years’ War (1756-1763), brought new territories under the power of the crown, but the expensive conflict lead to new and unpopular taxes. Attempts by the British government to raise revenue by taxing the colonies (notably the Stamp Act of 1765, the Townshend Acts of 1767 and the Tea Act of 1773) met with heated protest among many colonists, who resented their lack of representation in Parliament and demanded the same rights as other British subjects. 

Colonial resistance led to violence in 1770, when British soldiers opened fire on a mob of colonists, killing five men in what was known as the Boston Massacre . After December 1773, when a band of Bostonians altered their appearance to hide their identity boarded British ships and dumped 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor during the Boston Tea Party , an outraged Parliament passed a series of measures (known as the Intolerable, or Coercive Acts ) designed to reassert imperial authority in Massachusetts .

Did you know? Now most famous as a traitor to the American cause, General Benedict Arnold began the Revolutionary War as one of its earliest heroes, helping lead rebel forces in the capture of Fort Ticonderoga in May 1775.

In response, a group of colonial delegates (including George Washington of Virginia , John and Samuel Adams of Massachusetts, Patrick Henry of Virginia and John Jay of New York ) met in Philadelphia in September 1774 to give voice to their grievances against the British crown. This First Continental Congress did not go so far as to demand independence from Britain, but it denounced taxation without representation, as well as the maintenance of the British army in the colonies without their consent. It issued a declaration of the rights due every citizen, including life, liberty, property, assembly and trial by jury. The Continental Congress voted to meet again in May 1775 to consider further action, but by that time violence had already broken out. 

On the night of April 18, 1775, hundreds of British troops marched from Boston to nearby Concord, Massachusetts in order to seize an arms cache. Paul Revere and other riders sounded the alarm, and colonial militiamen began mobilizing to intercept the Redcoats. On April 19, local militiamen clashed with British soldiers in the Battles of Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts, marking the “shot heard round the world” that signified the start of the Revolutionary War. 

HISTORY Vault: The Revolution

From the roots of the rebellion to the adoption of the U.S. Constitution, explore this pivotal era in American history through sweeping cinematic recreations.

Declaring Independence (1775-76)

When the Second Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia, delegates—including new additions Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson —voted to form a Continental Army, with Washington as its commander in chief. On June 17, in the Revolution’s first major battle, colonial forces inflicted heavy casualties on the British regiment of General William Howe at Breed’s Hill in Boston. The engagement, known as the Battle of Bunker Hill , ended in British victory, but lent encouragement to the revolutionary cause. 

Throughout that fall and winter, Washington’s forces struggled to keep the British contained in Boston, but artillery captured at Fort Ticonderoga in New York helped shift the balance of that struggle in late winter. The British evacuated the city in March 1776, with Howe and his men retreating to Canada to prepare a major invasion of New York.

By June 1776, with the Revolutionary War in full swing, a growing majority of the colonists had come to favor independence from Britain. On July 4 , the Continental Congress voted to adopt the Declaration of Independence , drafted by a five-man committee including Franklin and John Adams but written mainly by Jefferson. That same month, determined to crush the rebellion, the British government sent a large fleet, along with more than 34,000 troops to New York. In August, Howe’s Redcoats routed the Continental Army on Long Island; Washington was forced to evacuate his troops from New York City by September. Pushed across the Delaware River , Washington fought back with a surprise attack in Trenton, New Jersey , on Christmas night and won another victory at Princeton to revive the rebels’ flagging hopes before making winter quarters at Morristown.

Saratoga: Revolutionary War Turning Point (1777-78)

British strategy in 1777 involved two main prongs of attack aimed at separating New England (where the rebellion enjoyed the most popular support) from the other colonies. To that end, General John Burgoyne’s army marched south from Canada toward a planned meeting with Howe’s forces on the Hudson River . Burgoyne’s men dealt a devastating loss to the Americans in July by retaking Fort Ticonderoga, while Howe decided to move his troops southward from New York to confront Washington’s army near the Chesapeake Bay. The British defeated the Americans at Brandywine Creek, Pennsylvania , on September 11 and entered Philadelphia on September 25. Washington rebounded to strike Germantown in early October before withdrawing to winter quarters near Valley Forge .

Howe’s move had left Burgoyne’s army exposed near Saratoga, New York, and the British suffered the consequences of this on September 19, when an American force under General Horatio Gates defeated them at Freeman’s Farm in the first Battle of Saratoga . After suffering another defeat on October 7 at Bemis Heights (the Second Battle of Saratoga), Burgoyne surrendered his remaining forces on October 17. The American victory Saratoga would prove to be a turning point of the American Revolution, as it prompted France (which had been secretly aiding the rebels since 1776) to enter the war openly on the American side, though it would not formally declare war on Great Britain until June 1778. The American Revolution, which had begun as a civil conflict between Britain and its colonies, had become a world war.

Stalemate in the North, Battle in the South (1778-81)

During the long, hard winter at Valley Forge, Washington’s troops benefited from the training and discipline of the Prussian military officer Baron Friedrich von Steuben (sent by the French) and the leadership of the French aristocrat Marquis de Lafayette . On June 28, 1778, as British forces under Sir Henry Clinton (who had replaced Howe as supreme commander) attempted to withdraw from Philadelphia to New York, Washington’s army attacked them near Monmouth, New Jersey. The battle effectively ended in a draw, as the Americans held their ground, but Clinton was able to get his army and supplies safely to New York. On July 8, a French fleet commanded by the Comte d’Estaing arrived off the Atlantic coast, ready to do battle with the British. A joint attack on the British at Newport, Rhode Island , in late July failed, and for the most part the war settled into a stalemate phase in the North.

The Americans suffered a number of setbacks from 1779 to 1781, including the defection of General Benedict Arnold to the British and the first serious mutinies within the Continental Army. In the South, the British occupied Georgia by early 1779 and captured Charleston, South Carolina in May 1780. British forces under Lord Charles Cornwallis then began an offensive in the region, crushing Gates’ American troops at Camden in mid-August, though the Americans scored a victory over Loyalist forces at King’s Mountain in early October. Nathanael Green replaced Gates as the American commander in the South that December. Under Green’s command, General Daniel Morgan scored a victory against a British force led by Colonel Banastre Tarleton at Cowpens, South Carolina, on January 17, 1781.

Revolutionary War Draws to a Close (1781-83)

By the fall of 1781, Greene’s American forces had managed to force Cornwallis and his men to withdraw to Virginia’s Yorktown peninsula, near where the York River empties into Chesapeake Bay. Supported by a French army commanded by General Jean Baptiste de Rochambeau, Washington moved against Yorktown with a total of around 14,000 soldiers, while a fleet of 36 French warships offshore prevented British reinforcement or evacuation. Trapped and overpowered, Cornwallis was forced to surrender his entire army on October 19. Claiming illness, the British general sent his deputy, Charles O’Hara, to surrender; after O’Hara approached Rochambeau to surrender his sword (the Frenchman deferred to Washington), Washington gave the nod to his own deputy, Benjamin Lincoln, who accepted it.

Though the movement for American independence effectively triumphed at the Battle of Yorktown , contemporary observers did not see that as the decisive victory yet. British forces remained stationed around Charleston, and the powerful main army still resided in New York. Though neither side would take decisive action over the better part of the next two years, the British removal of their troops from Charleston and Savannah in late 1782 finally pointed to the end of the conflict. British and American negotiators in Paris signed preliminary peace terms in Paris late that November, and on September 3, 1783, Great Britain formally recognized the independence of the United States in the Treaty of Paris . At the same time, Britain signed separate peace treaties with France and Spain (which had entered the conflict in 1779), bringing the American Revolution to a close after eight long years.

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American Revolution as a People’s War: A Bibliographical Essay by William Marina

Source: This essay first appeared in the journal Literature of Liberty: A Review of Contemporary Liberal Thought , vol. 1, no. 2 April/June 1978, published by the Cato Institute (1978-1979) and the Institute for Humane Studies (1980-1982) under the editorial direction of Leonard P. Liggio. It is republished with thanks to the original copyright holders.

William Marina is a Research Fellow at the Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif., and Professor Emeritus of History at Florida Atlantic University.

William Marina, "Revolution and Social Change: The American Revolution as a People's War"

Table of contents.

The Problems Facing a Paradigm of Social Change

A Paradigm for Understanding Revolution

Why? Ideology and Legitimacy in Revolutions

Who? Dynamics of Revolutionary Society

How? People's War and Revolution

What? Political and Constitutional Aftermath of Revolution

Equality in Human Action and Social Change

The Bailyn Interpretation: Ideology or Social Conflict?

Equality and the Historical Roots of Social Conflict

Equality and the Seventeenth Century English Revolutions

Equality, Social Structure, and Social Change in Eighteenth Century America

Pseudofeudal Inequalities and Social Unrest

Inequality, Archaic Communalism, and the Yeoman Freeholder

Equality: From Early Social Protest to Armed Defense

Social Dynamics of the Coalition for Independence

Common Sense: Social Equality, and Popular Justice

Equality: Social Divisions behind the Declaration of Independence

Equality: Individualist vs. Corporatist World Views

Revolutionary Warfare as a Social-Political Activity

British Failure to Understand Counterinsurgency

Militia vs. Standing Army and Empire

People's Militia, Guerrilla War, and Victory

Relevance of the Revolution's Military History

Ambiguities in Social-Political Groups: Agrarian Federalists vs. Commercial Nationalists?

Social Tensions and the Ambiguities of Republican Equality

Social Equality vs. the Inequalities of the Imperial System

Framework of Equality Behind Ratification

Bibliography

History's great tradition is to help us understand ourselves and our world so that each of us, individually and in conjunction with our fellow men, can formulate relevant and reasoned alternatives and become meaningful actors in making history . William Appleman Williams 1

Toward a Theory of Revolution

Just as "no man is an island," no historical event is isolated from its context of space and time. The American Revolution drew upon diverse ideas stretching back to the ancient world, was influenced by numerous social conditions each with its own past development, and involved the actions of millions of individuals over a span of years within a transatlantic area.

In examining a "symbolic" event such as the Revolution, however, we often overlook how our whole conceptualization of the boundaries of that "extended" event is largely based upon a sense of comparison. 2 In this regard, the key word is not "American," but "Revolution." Thus our perception of when the Revolution began and ended follows from our beliefs around the class of events we designate "revolutions."

Perez Zagorin defines three distinct lines of inquiry for studying revolution. The first is a detailed or general account of one specific revolution. The second presents a formal comparison of two or more revolutions to uncover any significant relationships between them. And, "finally, the third kind of inquiry is theoretical; its purpose is to establish a theory of revolution capable of explaining causes, processes, and effects as a type of change." 3 But, as Perez Zagorin observes, it is the third theoretical study of revolutions which is most impoverished:

[N]othing has appeared that qualifies as a general theory of revolution. Furthermore, among theorists there has been little progressive accumulation of ideas. The general theory of revolution remains subject to confusion, doubt, and disagreement. Even elementary questions of definition, terminology, and delimitation of the field to be explained are not settled. 4

Recent historiography of the American Revolution (with a few notable exceptions) has been preoccupied with the particular. But the most striking feature of the writings celebrating the Bicentennial has been the absence of any new, fresh interpretation explaining the broader meaning of that historic occurrence.

In addition, too much of historical scholarship is fragmented and overspecialized, and adrift without theoretical moorings or a unifying vision. 5

Our essay seeks to set the mass of recent scholarship of the American Revolution within the unifying paradigm of the sociology of revolution—of revolution as a people's war. This paradigm will permit a better understanding of the nature and meaning of the American Revolution. It will invoke as a leitmotif the tensions among inequality, equality, and egalitarianism which both inspired and divided the human actors of the Revolution.

This unifying paradigm and these issues concerned with equality will emerge as we answer four difficult questions about the era of the American Revolution:

(1) Why did a revolution occur in a society viewed as free and prosperous?

(2) Who formed the components of the changing revolutionary coalition?

(3) How did the American revolutionary coalition win its conflict with the leading imperial power?

(4) What was the nature of the society which emerged in the struggle of war and revolution?

Before answering these four questions at length in the major sections of our essay, we will first briefly define some preliminary issues relating both to a paradigm of revolutionary social change and to the role of equality in such change.

Robert Nisbet in Social Change and History traces the effort to understand and explain social change back to the pre-Socratic Greeks (in the West at least). Heraclitus saw all of life as involving change and he emphasized war as the ultimate activity stimulating social upheaval. 6 In developing a cosmology, Adam Smith, as a typical Enlightenment thinker, drew heavily upon concepts first articulated by the Greek Sophists. 7 Since the classical world view profoundly influenced the Renaissance and Enlightenment, it is not surprising that patterns of cyclical thought appear continuously from Machiavelli to John Adams.

Machiavelli, as J.G.A. Pocock shows in The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition , had an enormous impact upon English revolutionaries such as James Harrington, and hence on the later Whigs, and finally on the Americans who shared that outlook. A cyclical metaphor was at the core of the Americans' paradigm or framework for analyzing social change and revolution. 8

The emphasis on "modernization" in the sociology of revolution has stimulated the study of social change and has called into question the "inertia" or "tradition" paradigm for revolution. Perhaps the most influential recent contribution has been Barrington Moore, Jr.'s Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy . 9 One of Moore's most important contributions to an analysis of change was questioning the "inertia" paradigm, one of the unexamined assumptions about change. Borrowing from physics, the inertia paradigm assumed the existence of a traditional, natural order of things in society; only change away from this "norm" need be explained. Quite apart from the conservative bias, inertia overlooks the enormous educational effort required if that "tradition" is to be passed on from one generation to another. This does not happen automatically. The lack of social change in a society is equally as important to explain as any significant change. 10

Those who have lived through the last decade of change in America can appreciate the situation facing British officials after 1763. What sort of "tradition" could be emphasized in an Empire which (1) was still feeling the effects of a revolution less than a century before, (2) was already entering a series of changes collectively labeled "the Industrial Revolution," and (3) recently had acquired a vast overseas empire? Assuming it could be articulated, what meaning would that tradition have for colonists whose average age was roughly sixteen? Complicating the unity of a tradition was the soaring colonial population. A high birth rate and an influx of immigrants (many not from England) would virtually double that population during the years of the "revolutionary generation," over a third of whom would leave the seaboard areas for land in the interior.

From this viewpoint it is evident that we must consider revolution and social change on both a theoretical level and a global basis. Immanuel Wallerstein's The Modern World-System , 11 attempts to utilize such an approach, covering roughly the two hundred years after 1450. Wallerstein's approach reminds us how important is an analytical framework covering a vast historical landscape if we are to fashion more coherent theories of social change and revolution.

Strangely enough, in stressing this broad panorama, modern scholarship has just recently caught up with the popular social unrest which was perceived by many at the time. 12 This will serve as a theme of our essay: the nature of popular social unrest in the epoch of the American Revolution.

Our best perspective for examining the American Revolution is to sketch briefly the general agreement about the revolutionary process: the Why, Who, How, and What of revolution.

In reading through all the jargon of modern social science dealing with revolution and change (e.g., "J curves," "relative deprivation," and "rising expectations") we are forcefully impressed that these concepts, if not the terminology, were understood by the ancients, as well as many of the revolutionary generation in America.

As might be expected, much ink and paper have been expended simply on trying to define revolution. 13 We need not get bogged down in attempting to offer an all-inclusive definition. For our purposes, a useful, straightforward definition is that of Lyford P. Edwards in The Natural History of Revolution: "A change brought about not necessarily by force and violence, whereby one system of legality is terminated and another originated." 14

Assessing the necessary preconditions for revolution leads us to examine the composition of the potential revolutionary group. The important role of ideology is evidence in Crane Brinton's The Anatomy of Revolution , where he emphasizes "the desertion of the intellectuals" as a key phase in the prerevolutionary developments. 15 This involves more than desertion, however, for the intellectuals do not simply withdraw support from the "Old Regime" as Brinton termed those in power. Beyond merely deserting, a growing number of intellectuals mount an increasingly vigorous attack upon the very philosophical underpinnings of the Old Regime; even more importantly, they advance an alternative paradigm, or world view, about how the society ought to be organized. 16

The sociology of revolution demands much greater exploration of the whole question of legitimacy and how a new legitimacy comes to transplant the old. 17 In this regard, a very useful idea is the "paradigm" derived from the historian of science, Thomas S. Kuhn. 18 Our tendency to conceptualize reality in terms of a model, or paradigm, is closely related to the older tradition in the study of the sociology of knowledge which used the term Weltanschauung , or world view, to describe that idea. 19 If we see the paradigms as subsets within a world view, an individual might hold a number of separate or overlapping paradigms. The totality of these paradigms constitute his world view and seldom conflict with each other. 20

Kuhn's normal science—the dominant, accepted, legitimate paradigm—bears a similarity to the "Old Regime" in the study of the sociology of revolution. 21 A current belief in America holds that the authorities need to use force to restore law and order. That outlook seems to be a misreading of the dynamics of social change; real authority always rests upon legitimacy, not force. 22 Legitimacy is, in fact, the very antithesis of force. Large protests within a society usually decry some objective inequities, which fuel dissent.

Revolutions, whether in science or society as a whole, are preceded by what could be called "a crisis in legitimacy." Authority must ultimately rest on a belief, held by virtually the entire society, that the social order is legitimate, that it corresponds with the way things "ought" to be in a just and equitable society. Operationally, men seek solutions to social problems within this legitimate world view. Until a competing revolutionary world view arrives, no one suspects that a solution might be framed outside of this dominant world view.

The concept of legitimacy leads us into another important aspect of the revolutionary process: that is the societal dynamics in revolution, involving the relationship of the leadership to the larger population and the internal workings of the revolutionary coalition. The idea persists that the American Revolution was a minority affair. Walter Lippmann once observed: "Revolutions are always the work of a conscious minority." 23 Since revolutions always have leaders, it tells us little to observe that, say, the American Revolution was led by a small minority. This elite concept fosters the innuendo that such a minority simply manipulates the majority to do its bidding.

Against the view that a minority manipulates revolutions, a general postulate holds that at the level of legitimacy the great social revolutions have always involved the bulk of the population. If a dialogue between leaders and their supporters ceases, or if the leadership exceeds the limits of their legitimacy, then the revolutionary movement hesitates, loses momentum, and may fail altogether. The minority may then resort to force, a treacherous course, for the leadership then begins to lose the legitimacy which animated it, and is no longer very revolutionary.

In "Ideology and an Economic Interpretation of the Revolution" Joseph Ernst has distinguished mentality, ideology, and world view. 24 Briefly defined, a "mentality" is a vague but usually broadly held attitude; the dynamic concept of equality that was increasingly held by Americans of the revolutionary generation is an example of such a mentality. Next, a more formal "ideology" characterizes the leadership in any sort of movement: an effort to explain and more fully understand the relationship "between ideas and social circumstances." At its most general level, the American ideology came to encompass republicanism. Finally, a "world view" is an even more detailed theoretical analysis developed only by a few, usually among the wider leadership. In the American Revolution, those who sought to comprehend the larger role of the British mercantile system, or Empire, were thereby propounding a world view that integrated social, economic, and political events.

Revolutions are shifting coalitions over time—among both the leadership and the larger population. Revolutionary coalitions embody all three of the levels of awareness and so contain overlapping areas of consensus and disagreement. Consequently, there will be basic "fault lines" that create internal divisions within those groups comprising the coalition. Over time, the dynamics of any revolution are shaped by the interaction of specific groups of interests within the coalition, as well as the interaction between them.

As an example, one of the basic fault lines in the American Revolution example divided those who wanted only independence from England from those who wished to seize the opportunity to work more extensive changes in the structure of American society. Was the American Revolution merely a colonial rebellion or was it a true social revolution? The answer is, of course, both. 25 Any future interpretation of the nature of the American Revolution must begin by making clear the internal divisions among the revolutionaries, and ways in which the evolving factions and coalitions shaped the direction of change. (This same debate has occupied historians of the Revolution since at least the time of J. Franklin Jameson's The American Revolution Considered as a Social Movement and Carl Becker's The History of Political Parties in the Province of New York .)

Explicating the relationship between the leadership and their supporters leads to another aspect of revolution: in what way does the military means employed affect the whole post-revolutionary society. Whether in an internal civil war or in a colonial war for independence, if one side is able to wage a "people's war," such a world view and organizational structure will have repercussions throughout the society. One of the major divisions in the American revolutionary coalition—between advocates of a traditional war as opposed to a people's war—reflected a fundamental difference in paradigms, if not world views, among different revolutionary factions.

Revolutionary coalitions cannot be maintained indefinitely. As a revolutionary era reaches its final stages, its radical actions are replaced by an effort to conserve the essentials of the revolutionary program. In the American case this is exemplified in the Constitution replacing the Articles of Confederation. Despite the heated debate over the Constitution, what is significant is that the opposition, with the inclusion of the Bill of Rights, did not conclude that the Constitution was a violation of what they conceived as a legitimate social order.

Our discussion of the sociology of revolution has highlighted the conditions and groups which make revolution a possibility and then a reality. Such an analysis may ignore the fact that individuals (rather than classes or coalitions) feel, think, and act. In short, there is a psychology as well as a sociology of revolution. (It is impossible to miss the Founding Fathers' constant references to ambition, fame, envy, power, or greed as significant factors.) Often lacking in contemporary theories of revolution and social change is an understanding that one must begin with a view of human action or nature which links the individual to the social groups of which he may become a part. 26

The drive for equality, broadly understood, can be viewed as the central motivating factor in all revolutionary action. Equality serves as the organizing principle for constructing a social interpretation of the revolutionary era. 27 The issue of equality follows from the fact that human beings as social animals demonstrate a tendency toward hierarchical attitudes.

There is a constant tension among three concepts: inequality, equality, and egalitarianism. First inequalitarians tend to be those at the top of a given social order; with their privileges usually based upon birth or wealth, they conceive of a rather rigid hierarchy with little mobility. A number of inequalitarians do feel some paternalistic concern for those beneath them, which may well be reciprocated from a few below.

By contrast, the egalitarian agitates for the destruction of this status system by redistributing property, wealth, and income. The egalitarian program necessitates the creation of an elite group of guardians whose task it will be to administer the new order. In reality, therefore, a fully egalitarian society is a logical impossibility: the small elite is always necessary. The equalitarian society is characterized by the idea of equality before the law. For the equalitarian the chance to compete does not imply the equal chance to win. In such a circumstance of individual differences, hierarchy—or ideally a plurality of hierarchies, offering each person an opportunity to find some field in which he can excel—continues to exist, permitting enormous mobility. The equalitarian society is a contract society, rather than a status society, and is based essentially upon achievement. J.R. Pole's The Pursuit of Equality in America is a reminder of how formative equality has been to the American experience, especially to the revolutionary era. 28

Why Did the Revolution Occur?

What I call virtue in the republic is the love of the patrie, that is to say, the love of equality . Montesquieu 29

The question of why the American Revolution occurred requires us to distinguish between long and short range factors. Further, in so far as these pertain to the changing structure of American society, were these such as to have created a loss of legitimacy by the government of the Mother Country, apart from actions initiated by the British authorities themselves?

The study most closely resembling an interpretation of the coming of the Revolution during the last decade is Bernard Bailyn's The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution . Bailyn wrote that as he studied the pamphlets and other writings of the revolutionary generation, he was "surprised" as he "discovered" that (even more than by the work of John Locke) the Americans had been influenced by the freedom oriented writings of Whig pamphleteers such as John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon's Cato's Letters and The Independent Whig . 30

But Bailyn's discovery of these "Old Whig" pamphleteers was anticipated by others. As early as 1789 David Ramsay's History of the American Revolution mentioned "those fashionable authors, who have defended the cause of liberty. Cato's Letters, The Independent Whig , and such were common…" Reminiscing in 1816 about the era of the 1770s John Adams observed, " Cato's Letters and The Independent Whig , and all the writings of Trenchard and Gordon,…all the writings relative to the revolutions in England became fashionable reading." 31

Bailyn's approach to ideas and historical causation fit comfortably with the dominant outlook which tends to downplay social and economic conflict—that is the struggle over power—in the American past, present, and indirectly, the future. But is it possible to separate ideology (as a cluster of ideas about reality and what ought to be) and political and constitutional issues from a social and economic context? Ideas cannot exist independent of some subject, content, and context.

In enforcing the importance of the writings of Whigs such as Trenchard and Gordon, Bailyn has rendered an important twofold service. First, it becomes apparent how far back beyond 1776 we must go to understand the ideas that were influencing Americans. Secondly, reading through the works of Trenchard and Gordon reveals the extent to which equality was the fundamental issue interwoven into the various specific issues with which they dealt. 32

With respect to both of Bailyn's points, J.G.A. Pocock's Machiavellian Moment takes us back to the efforts of Florentine thinkers to sustain a republican form of government. These thinkers (of which Machiavelli was the most profound) were deeply influenced by Aristotle's works and by their reading of the degeneration of the Roman Republic into Empire. One clue to Machiavelli's republicanism is his work as a militia organizer during the period of the Republic in Florence.

Two of the dominating concepts for these republican theorists were virtue and corruption, both essential to understanding the republican paradigm which culminated in the American Revolution. Montesquieu fully understood the republican bearing of virtue in his remark, quoted above, that virtue fundamentally depended upon the existence of equality. 33 Conversely, the corruption and decay which undermined republics were closely related to inequality. 34 Interwoven through Machiavelli's analysis is his deep concern with the whole question of legitimacy. 35

In Pocock's analysis, seventeenth-century England underwent many of the changes the Italian city states had experienced a century before, complicated by the Protestant Reformation. The English debate drew upon Machiavelli and the republican historians of the ancient world. Both Pocock's Machiavellian Moment and Christopher Hill's The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution 36 offer an abundance of evidence to link the debate to inequality/equality/egalitarian divisions.

Drawing upon the ancients, Machiavelli, and Harrington, the "Opposition," such as Trenchard and Gordon, stretched across a wide political spectrum. Caroline Robbins's The Eighteenth Century Commonwealthman indicates many Whigs thought of themselves as in the tradition of the Levellers of the English Revolution, and those views, stressing equality and liberty, were transmitted across the ocean to the New World. 37 In assessing the "Opposition," Kramnick's Bolingbroke and His Circle has focused some attention on the importance of Lord Bolingbroke. 38 Forrest McDonald in The Phaeton Ride has dealt with Bolingbroke's influence on later American leaders such as Thomas Jefferson. 39 Roger Durrell Parker has explored "The Gospel of Opposition" both in England and America. 40

There were enormous changes occurring in the areas of commerce, banking, and even in manufacturing. Even though the State had often been involved in the process, there was certainly no reason to believe that this had to be the case. 41 Indeed, a major issue separated the Court view (those who sought to use government in this economic development, and incidentally help themselves in the process) and the Country Party view (those who felt government intervention was not only unnecessary, but detrimental). The term Financial Revolution has been used by historians to suggest that this State interventionism was the only natural and necessary way to realize this process. This analysis tends to place opponents of the State's intervention in the economy as opponents of market developments, when that simply was not true. 42

The Country Party included men so wedded to a world view of agrarian independence that they wanted nothing to do with a financial, commercial, market revolution, with or without State interventionism. In its most rigid form, their's was an egalitarian program modeled on ancient Sparta. 43

Many of the Country Party, on the other hand, were committed to equality of opportunity before the law. They believed they could best achieve such equality by limiting the State to a very negative role. This view united them in their opposition to the statism of the Court Party and its evident inequalitarianism. They fully accepted the implications of the emerging urban-market revolution. They were in no way philosophically wedded to agrarian life. Farmlands were simply another area where market and technological techniques would yield important improvements. State interventionism was the enemy. 44

A final group was, perhaps, the most important and representative of all. Their rhetoric was usually agrarian. They understood the virtue of the agrarian life: the apparent political stability of a nation of independent yeomen. But they realized the potential benefits from an urban-market sector within society. They were also disenchanted with the long-range corruption of a state financial system based upon great extremes of wealth and the creation of an urban proletariat without property. 45 Whatever their ambivalences, they opposed the Court's alliance of State and private interests.

The ideology flowing from the English Revolution needs to be linked to the social change in the American colonies during the eighteenth century. In this reassessment the most important is Rowland Berthoff and John M. Murrin's "Feudalism, Communalism, and the Yeoman Freeholder: The American Revolution Considered as a Social Accident." 46 Berthoff and Murrin point out that "Until very recently few historians argued that the causes of the Revolution lay in the structure of colonial society." And "[n]either J. Franklin Jameson, when in 1925 he broached the question of the Revolution as a social movement, nor Frederick B. Tolles, in reassessing the matter in 1954, paid any attention to the possibility that social causes impelled the political events of the years 1763 to 1775." 47

One recent example is Gordon S. Wood's observation in "Rhetoric and Reality in the American Revolution," that " Something profoundly unsettling was going on in (their) society." 48 In going back to the half century before the Revolution, however, Berthoff and Murrin suggest that "[i]n certain ways economic growth and greater social maturity were making the New World resemble the Old more closely." In such a society "becoming both more like and more unlike that of Europe, more and more unsettled, more complex and less homogeneous, a revolutionary war—even one conducted for the most narrowly political ends—could hardly fail to stimulate certain kinds of change and inhibit others." 49

Berthoff and Murrin suggest that in American society a

recurrent tension between this conservative, even reactionary, ideal and the practical liberty and individuality that their new circumstances stimulated is a familiar theme of colonial history—Puritanism against secularism, communalism eroded by economic progress, hierarchic authority challenged by antinomianism. 50

Berthoff and Murrin disagree with those historians who believe "that feudalism was too anachronistic to survive in the free air of a new world." On the contrary:

The opposite explanation is more compelling. Feudal projects collapsed in the seventeenth century, not because America was too progressive to endure them, but because it was too primitive to sustain them. A feudal order necessarily implies a differentiation of function far beyond the capacity of new societies to create. In every colony the demographic base was much too narrow…. By 1730 the older colonies had become populous enough to make the old feudal claims incredibly lucrative. 51

On the shifting social pattern imposed by the State Berthoff and Murrin are worth quoting at length:

exploitation of legal privilege became the single greatest source of personal wealth in the colonies in the generation before Independence. By the 1760s the largest proprietors—and no one else in all of English America—were receiving colonial revenues comparable to the incomes of the greatest English noblemen and larger than those of the richest London merchants. Indeed the Penn claim was rapidly becoming the most valuable single holding in the Western world. 52

A number of historians such as Richard Maxwell Brown in "Violence and the American Revolution" have commented upon the rising level of internal social disorder and violence that preceded the American Revolution, and which mounted with growing intensity. 53 This protest needs to be linked to the pseudofeudal revival, for as Berthoff and Murrin observe, it "was as divisive as it was profitable, provoking more social violence after 1745 than perhaps any other problem."

Even prior to the Revolution the most violent protests against the pseudofeudal revival, as Berthoff and Murrin note, came from areas where the settlers were transplanted from New England. New England "resisted the feudal revival because in several important respects it was rather less modern than the rest of English America." The early New England town conducting its affairs through a general meeting of the freeholders, a large majority of the inhabitants, may seem modern, but "it embodied an archaic English tradition." 54 Kenneth Lockridge has called it a "Utopian Closed Corporate Community." 55 "Because it distilled the communal side of the medieval peasant experience—with lordship quite deliberately excluded—it could resist feudal claims with furious energy during the middle third of the eighteenth century." 56 But as Berthoff and Murrin point out, this communalism had been breaking down from other causes: "the population grew denser, less homogenous, more individualistic, and more European."

In the face of an attempted pseudofeudal revival, on the one hand, and the breakdown of the vestiges of communalism on the other, "the new democratic individualism harked back to yet a third English model that had survived more successfully in eighteenth-century America than in England itself—the yeoman freeholder." Here we are brought in contact again with the appeal of the "Country" ideology. In touching on the growing inequalities in prerevolutionary American society, Berthoff and Murrin observe that "the image of a golden age of republican equality, of a society of yeoman freeholders (abstracted from their place among the various interrelated classes of English social tradition and colonial reality), had its greatest appeal at a time when there was solid reason to feel things were going too far the other way." 57

The growth of cities and the development of a market economy are blamed for differences while the continued inequalities engendered by the statism of the political system itself are ignored. 58 To what extent did differences occur within the overall development of a rapidly expanding economy in which many were moving upward, though some more rapidly than others?

In addressing these long-run social trends, Jack P. Greene points out that one has to be careful not to ascribe social tensions too great a role in causing the Revolution. 59 However, the role of the British government's statist interventionism, which precipitated the social turmoil of the feudal revival, is inseparable from the extension of imperial policymaking, which led directly to the Revolution.

Who Formed the Revolutionary Coalition?

The leading men of America, we may believe, wish to continue to be the principal people in their own country . Adam Smith 60

Revolutions, of course, are not begotten by abstract social changes extending over a century, but by living individuals who come to feel social repercussions over relatively short periods of time. To survey this accelerating human drama of the American Revolution, we need to describe the shifting composition of the protest coalition as the issues moved toward self-defense and later independence.

Two distinct and dissatisfied groups launched protests against the elites who dominated a colonial society marked by inequalities. Both breathed inspiration from the Country-Whig tradition and its stress on equality. The first group, representing the mechanics and artisans of the burgeoning colonial urban centers, resented being cut off from full participation in the political system and its expanding social differentiation. As in Europe, where such unequal disfranchisement was even more extensive, organized rioting became a carefully orchestrated symptom of politics. 61

The second group comprised the townspeople and farmers in the western segments of several colonies, who chafed at the inequities of their underrepresentation in the assemblies. Serious protests erupted in New York, Pennsylvania, and the Carolinas during the same period as the developing quarrel with British imperial authorities. 62

The early social protests during the years 1759 to 1765 are well documented in Bernard Knollenberg's Origins of the American Revolution: 1759–1765 . Knollenberg observed, "in reading some accounts of the American Revolution, one gets the impression that until the very eve of the outbreak of war, active colonial opposition was limited to a relatively few propagandists and hotheads, which is far from true."

But the most unifying action of all was the Stamp Act of 1765. 63 Nothing better demonstrates the British notions of inequality and subordination. Thomas Whately, the official who drafted the Act, commented upon the higher tax on university and law degrees in America by saying that these were raised, "in order to keep mean persons out of those situations in life which they disgrace." 64 Clearly American equalitarian ideas of mobility, especially through education, were out of step with imperial thinking!

In The Founding of a Nation: A History of the American Revolution, 1763–1776 , Merrill Jensen has observed that the Stamp Act "transformed" the nature of "American opposition to British policies." The real engine of protest was the riots which disturbed the more conservative of the American leaders. 65 But the most lasting result of the Stamp Act protest was institutional: a communication network among the Americans grew out of the numerous protest organizations ranging from the Stamp Act Congress to the Sons of Liberty.

What provoked the final crisis, of course, was the Tea Act. Designed to aid that government chartered monopoly, the East India Company, the Act culminated in the famous Boston Tea Party (December 16, 1773). This defiance was a brilliant stroke to polarize the issue and undermine British legitimacy. The British, as is well-known, retaliated by passing the "Coercive," or "Intolerable Acts."

In the context of the crisis of legitimacy, the Intolerable Acts form a sort of watershed of revolution. David Ammerman's In the Common Cause: American Response to the Coercive Acts of 1774 indicates the new direction of revolutionary protest. The Americans responded by calling a Continental Congress.

It is noteworthy that the internal dynamics of the protest coalition were also changing, especially in Massachusetts, the heart of protest. Urban firebrands such as Samuel Adams now found themselves out-flanked, and even "out-radicaled," by the western agrarians 66 These militiamen were prepared to fight, if necessary, to protect their rights. As J.R. Pole observes in The Decision of American Independence , "The progressive breakdown of the formal structure of power threw unprecedented opportunities into the hands of the local militants." From early 1775 onward into the War itself, it was not unusual for local Committees of Safety to exert enormous pressure—a procedure known as Recantation—upon those suspected of Loyalist sympathies. Here was a People's War in action! The first fighting, of course, occurred when the British sought to march to Lexington and Concord, literally into the teeth of this armed countryside of agrarian militia.

Time, itself, is something of a legitimizer. Each day that American institutions ruled the country solidified the notion of their legitimacy. What Adam Smith realized in his memorandum (quoted earlier) to the British government was that local American leaders, having come to rule themselves and their communities for some period of time, would not easily surrender that role. 67 More than a military effort by the British would be needed to undo the organic development and growing legitimacy of such a revolutionary society.

In this interim, American thinking increasingly recognized that independence was the only solution to the problem. The catalyst of that final shift was Thomas Paine's little pamphlet "Common Sense."

Equality, as noted, had been a conspicuous thrust of the Whig tradition. In 1721, for example, in Cato's Letters number 45, "Of the Equality and Inequality of Men," Trenchard and Gordon had noted, "It is evident to common Sense, that there ought to be no Inequality in Society,…" Paine raised the same equalitarian concern in the quotation he chose for the cover of his own pamphlet: "Man knows no Master save creaking Heaven, Or those whom choice and common good ordain."

Paine opened "Common Sense" by distinguishing between "society," which "in every state is a blessing," and "government," which, "even in its best state, is but a necessary evil." Because of "the inability of moral virtue to govern the world," government, whose purpose was "security," was necessary. The best form of government was one which insured security "with the least expense and the greatest benefit."

Paine denied that independence would inaugurate a civil war among the colonies. "Where there are no distinctions there can be no superiority; perfect equality affords no temptation," Paine argued. "If there is any true cause of fear respecting independence, it is because no plan is yet laid down."

As John M. Head notes in A Time to Rend: An Essay on the Decision for American Independence , "As late as the fourth week of June, what the members of Congress would do about…independence was not irrevocably established." Certainly, the advocates of independence were concerned not only to vote it through, but that it win more than a slight majority. Popular pressures, rising up through the state governments especially after mid-May, changed the picture.

The Declaration of Independence was not, of course, in any sense a blueprint for a revolutionary society. At the same time, its emphasis on equality voiced something more than just a declaration of freedom from British rule. In recent years it has become fashionable to talk about the American Revolution as simply a conservative, colonial rebellion. These tensions swirling around the issue of equality would seem to belie that image. 68 We need to define precisely what criteria are being employed in making such an assessment. Many years ago R.R. Palmer noted the large percentage of Loyalists who left America, never to return. 69 Since this percentage of disenchanted emigrés was larger than that of other so-called more radical revolutions, it appears an unlikely yardstick to measure the radicalness of any revolution. And in a recent study, Men in Rebellion: Higher Governmental Leaders and the Coming of the American Revolution , James Kirby Martin has estimated that elite turnover averaged 77 percent, but ranged as high as 100 percent in several colonies. Compared with the 50 percent in Russia after 1917, this seems very radical indeed! As we shall see, it was this vast turnover and appearance of "new" men which sociologically explains the movement culminating in the adoption of the Constitution. 70

Finally, a word is in order about the Tories, or Loyalists. Despite some errors, William H. Nelson's little volume, The American Tory , remains the best. The occupations and social classes of the Loyalists cut across American society even if they were more highly represented among the old oligarchy. Thus, of the 300 people banished from Massachusetts in 1778, about a third were merchants and professional men, another third were farmers, and a final third were artisans, shopkeepers, and laborers. Nelson identifies two areas where Loyalists concentrated: the extreme western frontier from Georgia up into New York, and the maritime regions of the Middle Colonies. Religion also played a part, especially among minorities:

Almost all the Loyalists were, in one way or another, more afraid of America than they were of Britain. Almost all of them had interests that they felt needed protection from an American majority…. Not many Loyalists were as explicit in their distrust of individualism as, say, Jonathan Boucher, but most of them shared his suspicion of a political order based on the 'common good' if the common good was to be defined by a numerical majority.

There existed a conflict of fundamental world views. Loyalists and Patriots "differ not only about the Revolution itself, and revolutions in general: even more deeply, they differ about the essential functions of government, about the proper role of the State, and about the nature of society itself." It was in essence a confrontation between a corporatist and an individualist world view. 71

How Was the Revolution Fought Militarily?

"War is ten percent fighting, ten percent waiting, and eighty percent self-improvement." 72 Mao Tse-tung

The question of how the Americans won the Revolution has for the most part been treated essentially as a military problem usually in terms of conventional armies confronting each other in a series of set battles and campaigns. Some theorists on guerrilla warfare such as Lewis H. Gann, Guerrillas in History , for example, have seen the American Revolution as of little relevance to understanding that mode of warfare:

Regarding revolutions in general, nothing can be more dangerous to insurrectionary planners than the romantic notion that virtuous peoples—rightly struggling to be free—must necessarily win in their struggles against tyrants. This interpretation is based on a misconceived idea of revolutionary wars that many textbooks help to perpetuate. According to the old version, the Americans won the War of Independence because the British Redcoats were no match against liberty-loving farmers sniping from behind cover against over-disciplined regulars…. But the American War of Independence was not mainly won by guerrillas but by regular soldiers and sailors. British soldiers were perfectly capable of becoming as skilled in skirmishing as their American opponents. 73

Gann's observations are indicative of the misunderstanding of some writers on guerrilla or counterinsurgency warfare. While guerrilla warfare is a part, a tactic, of revolutionary warfare; the two are not the same. Certainly, neither virtue nor mass support of a population can guarantee victory—a superior foe willing to employ a pacification program involving mass genocide may win—but the support and involvement of the people is a necessary prerequisite to victory in revolutionary warfare, and it is significant that this aspect is now in the process of rediscovery. However, it is peripheral to the essence of revolutionary warfare whether the regular soldiers of an occupying force can develop counterinsurgency techniques. For revolutionary warfare is essentially a political activity, as the quote from Mao above clearly implies. "Self-improvement" means not only as a fighting force, but also in raising the level of consciousness both of the soldiers and of the people as a whole, from a "mentality" toward an "ideology" (in Joseph Ernst's terms).

As James W. Pohl has observed, perhaps the most astute American analyst of people's revolutionary war was Thomas Paine. His Crisis papers, written between 1776 and 1783, are literally filled with observations such as the following: "It is distressing to see an enemy advancing into a country, but it is the only place in which we can beat them" for such a campaign placed the enemy "where he is cut off from all supplies, and must sooner or later inevitably fall into our hands." 74

Since the Americans controlled the country, except where there were British troops—and several times during the war when British armies were in transport at sea none of their forces were on American soil—the British had to devise a strategy to regain North America. For most of the war the British imagined this as an essentially military problem. But from the standpoint of revolutionary warfare and legitimacy, much more was involved. 75

George Washington had to devise a strategy to counter that of the British. In his recent study The Way of the Fox: American Strategy in the War for America, 1775–1783 , Dave Richard Palmer has traced this through several phases. A great deal has been made of the idea that several times, after American defeats, the British were near victory. A corollary is that American victory was possible only through an alliance with France. In the light of what we know about revolutionary warfare and the tactics of counterinsurgency, both of these assumptions appear wide of the mark.

The tactics of counterinsurgency may be summarized briefly (without mentioning the ideological dimension): first the enemy's regular army is broken up, then the irregular units, and, finally, as the remaining guerrillas are isolated from the population, the insurgency begins to dry up. It is also necessary to deny the enemy the use of any sanctuary into which he can retreat or from which he can secure supplies.

Viewed in this light, it is evident that the British never took the first step toward victory. The Americans understood fully the principles of "protracted" conflict. 76 British commanders acknowledged they controlled nothing except where their armies encamped. Lacking that first step, pacification became impossible.

New England, staunchly Patriot—94 percent in Connecticut, for example—was the sanctuary of American forces. From this source supplies and troops flowed, on an irregular basis to be sure, to the American army. In a fine account Page Smith has explained why Washington's army varied so greatly in size, sometimes from one week to the next, as men went back to farm. 77 Every fall these farmers went back to plant, but in the spring, year after year, they returned to fight again.

The above suggests that a sociological analysis of the American army would be of value. Here again, the inequalitarian-equalitarian-egalitarian tension played an important part.

From a sociological perspective, the courageous army that struggled through that memorable winter at Valley Forge was hardly representative of either the army or the population supporting it. It was noted above that the backbone of the fighting army of the spring and summer—whether militia or Continentals—often returned to their farms during the fall and especially the winter. Apart from the officers, a high percentage of the winter soldiers were what might otherwise be called displaced men. With few roots in the society, they had nowhere else to go. Years ago Allen Bowman in The Morale of the American Revolutionary Army explored the number of foreigners, convicts, 'former' Loyalists, and British deserters who formed the ranks of the army.

The ambitions of much of the officer corps, and the sense of inequality in some of them, must also be related to the function of the regular army as a military instrument. 78 It also reveals one of the major fault lines within the revolutionary coalition. A tenet of radical Whiggism detailed in Lois Schwoerer, "No Standing Armies!" The Antiarmy Ideology in Seventeenth Century England grew out of the "Standing Army" controversy in England. 79 Men such as John Trenchard fully understood, from the English Revolution and after, that the King's power rested on his control of a regular, standing army. Bernard Knollenberg's Origins of the American Revolution and Growth of the American Revolution suggest that radical success was a factor in the decision by British policymakers to garrison a force in North America, which might be used there or brought back home to quell domestic dissent.

Radical Whiggism leaned, therefore, toward the idea of a people's militia, as was to be reflected later in the Second Amendment to the American Constitution. Such a force tends to be essentially defensive, as we shall see. It fights best when the enemy invades its community. It has neither the organization, training, weaponry, nor motivation for an offensive action, let alone a sustained one. Its very decentralization mitigates against very effective hierarchical command from above.

On the other hand, Richard Kohn in "The Murder of the Militia System" and Eagle and Sword describes how the less radical members of the American revolutionary coalition tended to think along more conventional military lines. 80 Unlike the militia, an organized army is capable of a sustained, offensive campaign. It can initiate an assault, capture, and hold extensive territory.

Beginning with a mentality of equality, a few Americans did not stop with an ideology of republicanism, but carried the analysis a step further, toward a world view of empire. Even young John Adams, who was less drawn toward empire than some other leaders and could write about its contradictions in the 1775 Novanglus letters, was capable of such an imperial vision. 81 The most immediate example of the focus of this kind of world view was Canada. Can it be accidental that in 1775, with the British army bottled up in Boston, the American leadership took the opportunity to launch a nearly successful, and then ultimately disastrous, attack on Canada? Assuming the Americans thought the Canadians wanted liberation, which soon appeared an illusion, how can we explain the continued appeal of a Canadian expedition except in terms of empire? As the war drew to a close, Washington and others were still envisioning such a campaign, despite their scant resources. The dreams of empire died hard.

The question of Canada, however, leads to another facet of the war, the French Alliance. Richard B. Morris in The American Revolution Reconsidered , is one of the few historians who suggests, with plausibility, that victory would have been possible without the Alliance, and that the Alliance probably created as many problems as it solved. The opportunity to acquire Canada was also a factor in the alliance with the French. The continued American desire for Canada and the French coolness toward this imperial thrust is described in William C. Stinchcombe, The American Revolution and the French Alliance . Some Americans wanted not only independence, but independence and empire. To understand better that goal and its relationship with the Alliance, the situation in late 1777 and early 1778 must be recalled.

Late in 1777 the British had not only suffered a significant defeat at Germantown, but had also lost their first army at Saratoga. The losses to militia forces, such as John Stark's Green Mountain Boys, which Burgoyne suffered on route, weakened the British army. At the first battle of Saratoga (September 19, 1777), Burgoyne took heavy casualties from Daniel Morgan's sharpshooters, on which see Don Higginbotham, Daniel Morgan: Revolutionary Rifleman , and North Callahan, Daniel Morgan: Ranger of the Revolution . Horatio Gates effectively used the American militia and applied guerrilla strategy in forcing Burgoyne's surrender at Saratoga (October 17, 1777).

The peace feelers that resulted in the Carlisle Commission were superceded by the news of the French Alliance. What is most interesting is the shrill tone with which the American leadership greeted these efforts at negotiation. Surely at that date, this was not a question of undercutting the legitimacy of the American leadership. The more hawkish British leaders correctly indicated that the very negotiations with the Congress added to its legitimacy. What the Congress seemed most intent on doing was cutting off any dialogue between the members of the Carlisle Commission and the larger American population. 82 It does not seem unfair to suggest that the great fear might have been that negotiations, once under way, might culminate in independence without empire. The alternative of independence without empire might satisfy the great majority of the people; it was certainly less acceptable to a segment of the leadership concerned with empire. The most complete study is Weldon A. Brown, Empire or Independence: A Study in the Failure of Reconciliation, 1774–1783 . 83 Franklin, in demanding Florida and Canada, plus an indemnity, was not offering conditions upon which to open negotiations but rather to abort them, and that is the way the British interpreted his actions. The failure of these negotiations protracted the war for over three more years with great suffering on both sides. In a peace two years after that, the Americans finally settled for independence without empire.

What, then, did the Americans gain from the Alliance? Little more than might have been negotiated in 1778. It is true that a French army and naval force made possible Cornwallis's surrender at Yorktown, but that event cannot be dealt with in isolation. The exhaustion of his army in its weaving campaign through the South had been very much the work of regular, partisan, and guerrilla American units.

Nathanael Greene's strategy of dispersal of forces created the basis for the partisan warfare campaign in the South. John Shy's "The American Revolution: The Military Conflict Considered as a Revolutionary War," Don Higginbotham's The War of American Independence; Military Attitudes, Policies, and Practices, 1763–1789 , and Russell F. Weigley's The Partisan War: The South Carolina Campaign of 1780–1782 provide important new analyses of the role of militia and guerrilla warfare. Hugh F. Rankin's Francis Marion: The Swamp Fox discusses the guerrilla volunteer marksmen who formed "Marion Brigade" which played a crucial part at battles such as Georgetown, Eutaw Springs, and Parker's Ferry. Don Higginbotham's "Daniel Morgan: Guerrilla Fighter" analyzes Daniel Morgan's guerrilla tactics (e.g., Cornwallis and Tarleton at the battles of Cowpens, South Carolina and in North Carolina) for which Morgan has been considered the greatest guerrilla commander of the Revolution.

The British called the area around Charlotte, North Carolina, the "Hornets' Nest," and later they were forced to abandon much of their equipment in evading engagements with American units. That every successful insurgency culminates in regular army forces accepting the surrender of their counterparts should never obscure the role of the irregulars. By that time, many of the irregulars remained in the countryside to administer order, or had returned to their work.

After 1778, British strategy moved toward the possibility of developing a pacification program. As Shy's A People Numerous and Armed makes clear, the fundamental problem was always the American militia:

The British and their allies were fascinated by the rebel militia. Poorly trained and badly led, often without bayonets, seldom comprised of the deadly marksmen dear to American legend, the Revolutionary militia was much more than a military joke, and perhaps the British came to understand that better than did many Americans themselves. The militia enforced law and maintained order wherever the British army did not, and its presence made the movement of smaller British formations dangerous. Washington never ceased complaining about his militia—about their undependability, their indiscipline, their cowardice under fire—but from the British viewpoint, rebel militia was one of the most troublesome and predictable elements in a confusing war. The militia nullified every British attempt to impose royal authority short of using massive armed force. The militia regularly made British light infantry, German Jager, and Tory raiders pay a price, whatever the cost to the militia itself, for their constant probing, foraging, and marauding. The militia never failed in a real emergency to provide reinforcements and even reluctant draftees for the State and Continental regular forces. From the British viewpoint, the militia was the virtually inexhaustible reservoir of rebel military manpower, and it was also the sand in the gears of the pacification machine. 84

We have only one intensive case study of the American militia operating in a given locale, Adrian Leiby's insightful The American Revolutionary War in the Hackensack Valley . 85 What is significant is that here we are dealing not with an area where the British penetrated only once or twice during the course of the Revolution. On the contrary, one area—Bergen County across the Hudson from New York City—was under the guns of the British and thereby contested for during virtually the entire course of the War. It was thus almost a classic laboratory case for examining the development of an American guerrilla unit. Under the direction of Major John M. Goetschius, the Dutch farmers built a guerrilla unit that from hesitant beginnings by the end of the War matured into a more effective fighting group than the regular army. His correspondence with Washington makes plain that the Dutchman commanded a better understanding of the essentials of revolutionary guerrilla warfare than did his Commander-in-Chief. 86

What relevance, if any, is the military history of the American Revolution to an age when liberty seems threatened from within and without? In their study of history the radical Whigs had concluded that the internal threat of a standing, professional, volunteer army far outweighed its potential utility against a foreign threat. Today we know that the irregular, people's army functioned far more effectively than was formerly imagined. There are those, of course, who say that times have changed: that even the "lesson" of Vietnam, of what a guerrilla force can do (provided the larger power does not resort to genocide or nuclear weapons) is irrelevant to a confrontation between the superpowers. While other Communist leaders in the Russian Revolution often criticized the effectiveness of the peasant militia, Leon Trotsky appreciated how truly effective was their fighting capacity against the regular army. He understood that the Party must later smash their "individualism," and virtually "anarchic" desire to hold their own "individual plots" of land: "Today, free, he for the first feels himself to be someone, and he starts to think that he is the centre of the universe." 87

What Was the Revolution's Political and Constitutional Resolution?

It has ever been my hobby-horse to see rising in America an empire of liberty, and a prospect of two or three hundred millions of freemen, without one noble or one king among them. You say it is impossible. If I should agree with you in this, I would still say, let us try the experiment, and preserve our equality as long as we can. A better system of education for the common people might preserve them long from such artificial inequalities as are prejudicial to society, by confounding the natural distinction of right and wrong, virtue and vice . John Adams, 1786 88

A major question for historians is: What changes occurred in American society as a result of the War and the drive for equality? These developments provide a framework for understanding the equalitarian forces that pushed for replacing the Articles of Confederation and ratifying the Constitution.

Recent assessments of the motivations supporting the Constitution go back to Charles Beard's famous economic interpretation. Without entering into a discussion of Beard's interpretation, some of his economic data may be incorporated into a valid social interpretation of the Constitution.

The American revolutionary leadership studied the past, in part, to build ideologies and world views for shaping the future. "Given the social and cultural structure of the United States during the 1780s, we can deduce that men differed radically over what constitutes the Good Society." 89

Lee Benson, together with other writers, "assume[s] that the characteristics that predisposed men to agrarianism tended also to predispose them to distrust the State." And, "it follows, therefore, that the new nation should be a decentralized, loose confederation of the several independent states." On the other hand, "within a liberal republic, the logical corollary of 'commercialism' was a system derived from the proposition that the State could function as a creative, powerful instrument for realizing the Good Society…[T]hey believed the State must be strong and centralized." 90

While Benson acknowledged that not "all agrarians were federalists" or "all Commercialists nationalists," nonetheless, "a marked tendency existed for agrarians to be federalists and commercialists to be nationalists." Caution is demanded in doing justice to the relationships between agrarianism/commercialism and distrust of the State, as well as between the decentralized State/Centralized State. 91 The critical factor, therefore, was that the perceived political crisis had caused some agrarians—who would otherwise have preferred small government, focused at the state level—to accept a nationalist solution. But that strange union of agrarianism and nationalism is difficult to sustain without the ultimate use of force to retain what are conceived of as the agrarian virtues. 92

The most thorough recent study of the period during and after the Revolution, culminating in the adoption of the Constitution, is Gordon S. Wood's The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 . The first part, "Ideology of the Revolution," discusses the Whig world view. Wood underlines the important concepts of Virtue and Equality in the Whig Republican paradigm. Thus, the Revolution, they believed, would be "ultimately sustained by a basic transformation of their social structure." Obviously, that ideal could hardly be considered a conservative Revolution. While there were "sporadic suggestions for leveling legislation,"…"Equality was…not directly conceived of by most Americans in 1776, including such a devout republican like Samual Adams, as a social leveling." 93 Thus while the Americans recognized all sorts of natural distinctions in society, it was believed these would never become extreme:

It was widely believed that equality of opportunity would necessarily result in a rough equality of station, that as long as the social channels of ascent and descent were kept open, it would be impossible for any artificial aristocrats or overgrown rich men to maintain themselves for long. With social movement founded only on merit, no distinctions could have time to harden. 94

However, Wood notes the paradox in the American's belief that the ideal of equality would banish envy.

In an earlier article Wood had discussed the rising social tensions in much the same direction as Berthoff and Murrin. 95 "Politics, within the British imperial system, was highly personal and factionalized, involving bitter rivalry among small elite groups for the rewards of State authority, wealth, power, and prestige.

On the other hand, American Whigs had come to feel that removing the imperial system would cure the ills and disorders within the society. If extreme, their perceptions were not without some foundation: And the grievance which "particularly rankled" the Americans "was the abuse of royal authority in creating political and hence social distinctions," and "the manipulation of official appointments." 96 Any effort to close off a possibility of advancement and greater equality would, and did, lead to confrontation.

Studies more sympathetic than Wood's to the Articles of Confederation are Elisha P. Douglass, Rebels and Democrats: The Struggle for Equal Political Rights and Majority Rule During the American Revolution , and Merrill Jensen, The American Revolution Within America , 97 which covers more succinctly many of the points made by Wood. A useful interpretative survey of the issues and the literature culminating in the Constitution is Robert E. Shalhope, "Toward a Republican Synthesis: The Emergence of an Understanding of Republicanism in American Historiography." 98 One cannot overlook the militia as a political institution (whatever one's view of the effectiveness of these essentially defense-minded warriors) as described in David Curtis Skaggs's, "Flaming Patriots and Inflaming Demagogues: The Role of the Maryland Militia in Revolutionary Society and Politics." 99

The fact that government was decentralized under the Articles did not mean that its role at the state level would necessarily be small. 100 In most states the "new" men moved to implement a rather extensive program of state interventionism. This included extensive taxation and a monetary inflation which certainly must be regarded as egalitarian in its consequences. 101

In limiting the powers of both the executive and the courts, the general thrust of the American Revolution had been toward "popular sovereignty," placing major political power, with a few, if any, restraints, in the hands of the legislatures. This opened the door for extensive government interventionism, at the local and state levels to be sure, but with few protections for the individual outside the majority. 102

Something had happened after 1776 to convince many that the Republican experiment was not working as it should. The solution was to check the arbitrary powers of the populist, state legislatures, and the overly rapid rise of less than well educated "new" men, by raising the central focus of government to the national level. In a sense, it was a gamble to check egalitarianism, at least for a time, by institutionally moving toward the centralization that might hasten empire. Both empire and egalitarianism, of course, were the twin nemeses of republicanism; but there seemed no easy way to halt both. 103

Introduction

1. William Appleman Williams, The Contours of American History, 19.

2. The idea of a conceptualized, or "symbolic," event such as the Industrial Revolution, as compared to an actual, or "existential," event such as the death of Charles I, is taken from Page Smith, Historians and History, 202.

3. Perez Zagorin, "Theories of Revolution in Contemporary Historiography," Political Science Quarterly 88 (1973): 28–29.

4. Zagorin, "Theories of Revolution in Contemporary Historiography."

5. Merrill Jensen, The American Revolution Within America . Also see Melvin Richter, "The Uses of Theory: Tocqueville's Adaptation of Montesquieu," in Richter, ed., Essays in Theory and History , 75; Gene Wise, American Historical Explanations: A Strategy for Grounded Inquiry , 76. A good discussion of the rise of imperial authoritarianism, the decline of historical objectivity, and the intellectuals' scramble for financial support as described by Lucian of Samosata is Chester G. Starr, Civilization and the Caesars: The Intellectual Revolution in the Roman Empire , 259–261.

6. See Robert S. Nisbet, Social Change and History .

7. See Vernard Foley, The Social Physics of Adam Smith .

8. This is discussed in J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition , which also lists other of his important writings on the intellectual currents that influenced the American Revolution.

9. A good critique of this is Theda Skocpol, "A Critical Review of Barrington Moore's Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy," Politics and Society 4 (Fall 1973): 1–34.

10. See Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions . Cf. John A. Moorhouse, "The Mechanistic Foundations of Economic Analysis," Reason Papers 4 (Winter 1978): 49–67.

11. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century , the first of a projected four-volume series. Despite the socialist bias, and the propensity to reify the concept of capitalism, there is much of value in his work to certainly justify the ferment it created in sociology. Wallerstein devotes great attention to the institution of the State. But in the end his Marxian outlook prevents him from acknowledging the State as the most significant variable.

12. Jensen, Within America , 2.

13. See, for example, Dale Yoder, "Current Definitions of Revolution," American Journal of Sociology 32 (November 1926): 433–441.

14. A number of writers agree that certain preliminary circumstances are preconditions before any revolution can occur. Revolutions have tended to occur not in impoverished and retrogressive societies, but rather in those societies where significant advances had been under way. If the following terminology is different, the concepts are similar. Edwards refers to the "balked disposition;" Crane Brinton describes those who felt their situation "cramped;" James C. Davies posits a "J-curve"—a growing gap between expectations and results; and Ted Gurr's idea of relative deprivation. All derive from social psychology concepts of frustration-aggression. J.C. Davies, "Toward a Theory of Revolution," American Sociological Review 27 (February 1962): 5–19; Ted Robert Gurr, Why Men Rebel . The ancients were also aware that rapid change caused instability. In this regard, Aristotle made clear that a widely-based middle class was the greatest impediment to revolution. Despite all the "modern" theorizing, Aristotle's Politics , Part V, wherein he discusses revolution, is still well worth reading. Yet, however insightful the thesis of frustration-aggression seems, by itself this concept is too broad and general to be useful in understanding revolution.

15. Brinton, The Anatomy of Revolution , 44–52.

16. Edwards' understanding of the revolutionary process appears more subtle than that of the more famous work by Brinton. Brinton lost an important idea when he changed one of Edwards' key points, the "transfer of the allegiance of the intellectuals" to the "desertion of the intellectuals." "Transfer of allegiance," however, implies a sense of a loss of legitimacy or legality which far transcends the notion of mere support as a kind of cooperation.

17. Karl Deutsch indicated some years ago he had a study of legitimacy in progress. See also Claus Mueller, The Politics of Communication: A Study in the Political Sociology of Language, Socialization, and Legitimation ; and Ronald Rogowski, Rational Legitimacy: Theory of Political Support .

18. Kuhn, Structure .

19. See, especially, Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge .

20. William Marina, Egalitarianism and Empire , suggests three sources of values: supernaturalism, natural law, and statist, positive law.

21. Kuhn, Structure , 10. Kuhn began with a discussion of "normal science," which he defined as "research firmly based upon one or more past scientific achievements, achievements that some particular scientific community acknowledges for a time as supplying the foundation for its further practice." This "body of accepted theory…served for a time implicitly to define the legitimate [emphasis added] problems and methods of a research field for succeeding generations of practitioners." He concluded that "Men whose research is based on shared paradigms are committed to the same rules and standards for scientific practice. That commitment and the apparent consensus it produces are prerequisites for normal science, i.e., the genesis and continuation of a particular research tradition." Cf. Murray Rothbard, "Ludwig von Mises and the Paradigm for our Age," Modern Age (Fall 1971).

22. One is reminded of the marvelous symbol of authority, the conch shell, in William Golding's forceful study, The Lord of the Flies .

23. Washington Post , April 12, 1966.

24. "'Ideology' and an Economic Interpretation of The American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism ,' 159–185. See also T.F. Carney, The Shape of the Past: Models and Antiquity .

25. Thomas C. Barrow, "The American Revolution as a Colonial War for Independence," William and Mary Quarterly , 3d series, 25 (1968): 452–464.

26 . This outlook which permeates so many of the writings and correspondence of the revolutionary generation is captured in the title of John A. Schutz and Douglass Adair, eds., The Spur of Fame: Dialogues of John Adams and Benjamin Rush, 1805–1813 .

27. J.R. Pole's "Loyalists, Whigs, and the Idea of Equality," in Esmond Wright, ed., A Tug of Loyalities: Anglo-American Relations, 1765–1785 , 66–92; and Pole's B.K. Smith Lecture in Social Radicalism and the Idea of Equality in the American Revolution . Of the recent writings on the idea of equality, perhaps the most important, certainly with the most complete bibliography, is Herbert J. Gans, More Equality , though my own model and the direction of my thought is quite different from Gans's.

28. My essay can profitably be read in conjunction with the bibliographical essay of Professor Murray Rothbard published in the first issue of the Literature of Liberty . I hope soon to publish an expanded version of these observations on revolution and change in relation to the American Revolution, to be entitled, The American Revolution as a People's War: A Refutation of the Widely-Held Minority Myth, and Some Reflections on the Revolution from the Perspective of the Sociology of Revolution and a Theory of Social Change in an Age of Continuing Upheaval .

Why did the Revolution Occur?

29. Quoted in Alfred Cobban, New Cambridge Modern History . Vol. 7, 102.

30. Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution .

31. David Jacobson, The English Libertarian Heritage , Introduction; Clinton Rossiter, Seedtime of the Republic ; Carl Degler, Out of Our Past: The Forces that Shaped Modern America ; Eric Foner, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America .

32. See, for example, Trenchard and Gordon's essay, "Of the Equality and Inequality of Men," written in 1721, and reprinted in Jacobson, Heritage , 101–106.

33. Discussed in Robert G. Wesson, State Systems: International Pluralism in History , forthcoming.

34. Pocock, Machiavellian , 156, 191.

35. Pocock, 194, 208.

36. See especially his discussions of social tensions in Chapter 2, "The Parchment and the Fire"; of mobility and freedom in Chapter 3, "Masterless Men," as well as that of the relationship between the Levellers and the Army; the distinction between "Levellers and True Levellers" in Chapter 7; the reaction in Chapter 17, "The World Restored"; the conclusion, Chapter 18; and Appendices 1 and 2: "Hobbes and Winstanly: Reason and Politics"; and Melton and Bunyan: Dialogue with the Radicals." Given these parallels with the English Revolution, it was perceptive and appropriate that the English military band at the Yorktown surrender in 1781 should play "The World Turned Upside Down." Also see Perez Zagorin, The Court and the Country .

37. Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth Century Commonwealthman, Studies in the Transmission, Development and Circumstance of English Liberal Thought from the Restoration of Charles II until the War with the Thirteen Colonies . Also see J.P. Kenyon, Revolution Principles, 1689–1720 , especially 102–127.

38. Cf. Pocock, Machiavellian , 424, 426.

39. Forrest McDonald, The Phaeton Ride: The Crisis of American Success , especially the first part of Chapter 2, "The Populists and the Predators."

40. Rodger Durrell Parker, "The Gospel of Opposition: A Study in Eighteenth Century Anglo-American Ideology," doctoral dissertation, Wayne State University, 1975, University Microfilm publication 76–10, 990.

41. See, for example, Carroll Quigley, The Evolution of Civilizations ; and, on China, Mark Elvin, The Pattern of the Chinese Post: A Social and Economic Interpretation .

42. The most obvious example is, of course, Adam Smith. Another is Tom Paine. Both favored the Financial Revolution but not State interference.

43. Pocock, Machiavellian , 210–211, 391–399, 468–469. The less extreme version of this idea in Harrington and in Trenchard and Gordon "had in mind not so much a leveling of property as 'an agrarian law, or something like it' to ensure that no individual or group became so rich as to reduce the others to dependence." Pocock, Machiavellian , 468, and quoting from Cato's Letters . The "something" indicates how far were the Commonwealthmen from any worked out plan or agreement about how to deal with extremes of wealth in their republican conceptualization, whether agrarian or commercial.

44. As Pocock observes:

"We have already seen that neither [Andrew] Fletcher nor [Daniel] Defoe operated in terms of a simple opposition between land and trade—which should warn us against expecting Augustan politics to look like a simple confrontation between gentleman and merchant—but that each indicates in opposite ways the difficulties of constructing a fully legitimized history out of the movement from one principle to the other."

Unlike McDonald or Parker, who place Charles Davenant in the Country camp, Pocock appreciates the subtlety of shifting positions and the relationship of all of this to statism and war: "Davenant, more than Fletcher, [John] Toland, or (at this time) Trenchard, was engrossed in the problem of war's ability to generate corrupting forms of finance; and while a major significance of his thought to us is that he looked beyond the problem of trade to that of credit, he did so in the context provided by war." Pocock, Machiavellian , 436–437.

45. See, again, Pocock, Machiavellian , especially Chapter 12, "The Anglicization of the Republic: B) Court, Country and Standing Army"; Chapter 13, "Neo-Machiavellian Political Economy: The Augustan Debate over Land, Trade and Credit"; and Chapter 14, "The Eighteenth Century Debate: Virtue, Passion and Commerce." One is reminded of W.A. Williams's comment that Charles A. Beard was "almost" a socialist—a very wide gap indeed.

46. In Kurtz and Hutson, Essays on the American Revolution , 256–288.

47 . Berthoff and Murrin, "Feudalism," 257. The reference is to Jameson, Social Movement , and Frederick B. Tolles, "The American Revolution Considered as a Social Movement: A Reevaluation," American Historical Review 60 (1954–1955): 1–12. Also see Thomas C. Barrow, "The American Revolution as a Colonial War for Independence," William and Mary Quarterly 3d ser. 25 (1968): 464, quoted in Berthoff and Murrin, "Feudalism," 259.

48. Berthoff and Murrin, 258, quoting Gordon S. Wood, "Rhetoric and Reality in the American Revolution," William and Mary Quarterly 3d ser. 23 (1966): 31.

49. Berthoff and Murrin, 261.

50. Berthoff and Murrin, 262–263.

51. Berthoff and Murrin, 264–265. Another who takes this view of the importance of feudalism in the coming of the Revolution is Robert A. Nisbet, The Social Impact of the Revolution . If I had to recommend a single selection about the meaning of the American Revolution, I believe I would choose Nisbet's perceptive little twenty-three page pamphlet. He advocates a comparative approach, and in arguing it was a real social revolution against feudalism, makes the following points:

"More than any other type of social organization, feudalism seems not only to invite but to succumb to revolution…. because it virtually consecrates inequality—the prime cause of revolution everywhere, as Tocqueville pointed out—and…succumbs rather easily because of its seeming inability to command wide loyalties…. [A]ll the revolutions of modern history have been those launched against systems more nearly feudal than capitalist." (p. 3).

Nisbet suggests there might have been no social revolution "without a precipitating war in which ideological values were strong." War has accompanied each of the great revolutions, and "[t]he link between war and revolution is both existentially and historically close" (p. 9). Among the revolutionary changes he sees are: relation between land and the family (primogeniture and entail) over thirteen separate colonies, confiscation of estates, religious freedom, and some change in attitudes toward slavery (pp. 10–16).

In proclaiming the American Revolution in every way a true social revolution, Nisbet thinks we err in making terror the "touchstone of revolution": for "[t]o deny the status of revolution because of the absence of these qualities is like denying the status of war because of the absence of atrocities." It was hardly a local affair, and again we err if we "ignore the libertarian currents that the event set off throughout the world" (p. 23).

52. Berthoff and Murrin, 266–267. Herbert Aptheker's The American Revolution , some years ago, mentioned the rapidly growing sums of quit-rents in the years just prior to the Revolution. Tocqueville was the first to point to this relationship of what might really be called a pseudofeudalism. This kind of reactionary statism has almost nothing to do with market capitalism, and as Berthoff and Murrin note, "After 50 years of attempts to interpret the French Revolution in terms of a clash between a feudal and capitalistic order, many historians are now moving quite decisively back toward Tocqueville."

53. "Violence and the American Revolution" in Kurtz and Hutson, Essays , 81–120, and Alfred F. Young, The Democratic Republicans of New York: The Origins, 1763 –1797.

54. Berthoff and Murrin, 274.

55. Berthoff and Murrin, 274.

56. Berthoff and Murrin, 274–275. A recent, excellent study on the period after 1775 is Robert A. Gross, The Minutemen and Their World , a careful analysis of Concord during the War.

57. Berthoff and Murrin, 281.

58. The Social Structure of Revolutionary America , 286, cited in Berthoff and Murrin, 280.

59. "The Social Origins of the American Revolution: An Evaluation and an Interpretation," Political Science Quarterly 87 (1973): 1–22; Kenneth A. Lockridge, "Social Change and the Meaning of the American Revolution," Journal of Social History 6 (1973): 403–439, which outlines a number of points similar to Berthoff and Murrin.

60. In G.H. Guttridge, "Adam Smith on the American Revolution: an Unpublished Memorial," American Historical Review 38 (1933): 714–720.

61. See Richard Maxwell Brown, "Violence and the American Revolution," in Kurtz and Hutson, Essays , 81–120, and the numerous bibliographical items noted therein. Also awaited is publication of Alfred Young's study of the radical political uses of traditional Boston carnivals and parades.

62. See Gary B. Nash, "Social Change and the Growth of Prerevolutionary Urban Radicalism"; Edward Countryman, "'Out of the Bounds of the Law': Northern Land Rioters in the Eighteenth Century"; Marvin L. Michael Kay, "The North Carolina Regulation, 1766–1776: A Class Conflict"; Dirk Hoerder, "Boston Leaders and Boston Crowds, 1765–1776"; and Ronald Hoffman, "The 'Disaffected' in the Revolutionary South," all in Alfred F. Young, ed., The American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism .

63. Edmund and Helen Moragn, The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution .

64. In Murray N. Rothbard, Advance to Revolution, 1760–1775 , Vol. III of Conceived in Liberty , 90.

65. See, for example, Lawrence H. Gipson, Jared Ingersoll ; Alan Rogers, Empire and Liberty: American Resistance to British Authority, 1755–1763 ; Schlesinger, The Colonial Merchants and the American Revolution, 1763–1776 ; and Jensen, Founding .

66. Jensen, Founding ; Richard D. Brown, Revolutionary Politics in Massachusetts: The Boston Committee of Correspondence and the Towns, 1772–1774 ; and J.R. Pole, Political Representation in England and the Origins of the American Republic .

67. Guttridge, "Smith."

68. Pole, Equality , Chapter 2.

69. The Age of Democratic Revolution , Vol. I, 185–190.

70. The best interpretation of this process over the whole revolutionary era is Merrill Jensen, The American Revolution Within America . See also Library of Congress, Leadership in the American Revolution , papers presented at a Symposium.

71. There has been of late considerable literature on the Loyalists, perhaps the best (with a very complete bibliographical essay) is Robert McClure Calhoon, The Loyalist in Revolutionary America 1760–1781 .

How Was The Revolution Fought Militarily

72. Quoted in Ferdinand E. Banks, Scarcity, Energy, and Economic Progress , xvii.

73. Lewis H. Gann, Guerrillas in History , 92.

74. James W. Pohl, "The American Revolution and the Vietnamese War: Pertinent Military Analogies," The History Teacher 7 (February 1974): 259.

75. See, for example, David V.I. Bell and Allan E. Goodman, "Vietnam and the American Revolution," Yale Review 61 (Fall 1971): 26–34; Roy K. Flint, "The Web of Victory: Revolutionary Warfare in Eighteenth Century America, (West Point: mimeograph, 1976); and the following by John Shy: "The American Revolution: The Military Conflict Considered as a Revolutionary War," in Kurtz and Hutson, Essays , 121–156, also reprinted in Shy's A People Numerous and Armed: Reflections on the Military Struggle for American Independence , in which several essays reflect the influence of Vietnam; Shy, "The American Revolution Today," in Stanley J. Unterdal, ed., Military History of the American Revolution , 18–32, especially 21; and Shy, "Charles Lee: The Soldier as Radical," in George Athan Billias, George Washington's Generals , 22–53.

76. Washington, himself, used the term "protract," and Hamilton understood the same tactic of keeping an army in the field, avoiding a direct confrontation except on one's own terms, and harassing the enemy piecemeal. This is discussed in William Marina, "The American Revolution and the Minority Myth," Modern Age 20 (Summer 1976): 298–309; and William Marina, "The American Revolution as a People's War," Reason 8 (July 1976): 28–38.

77. Smith, New Age , passim.

78. Jonathan Gregory Rossie, The Politics of Command in the American Revolution . Rossie mentions that his interest in the subject was inspired by Bernard Knollenberg's Washington and the Revolution: A Reappraisal , published some 35 years earlier. Bernhard A. Uhlendorf, translator and annotator, Revolution in America: Confidential Letters and Journals, 1776–1784, of Adjutant General Major Baurmeister of the Hessian Forces , especially 146. Marion Balderston and David Syrett, The Lost War: Letters from British Officers During the American Revolution . John Shy, "Hearts and Minds in the American Revolution: The Case of 'Long Bill' Scott and Peterborough, New Hampshire," in Shy, People , 168. On this motive in Vietnam, going back to the French period and the breakup of the integrity of village life, see the works of the French sociologist Paul Mus, Frances Fitzgerald, and also John T. McAlister, Jr., Vietnam: Origins of the Revolution . See also Larry G. Bowman, Captive Americans: Prisoners during the American Revolution .

79. See also Lois F. Schwoerer, "The Literature of the Standing Army Controversy," Huntington Library Quarterly 28 (1964–1965): 187–212.

80. Richard H. Kohn, "The Murder of the Militia System in the Aftermath of the American Revolution," in Unterdal, Military History , 110–126; and Kohn, Eagle and Sword: The Federalists and the Creation of the Military Establishment in America, 1783–1802 . As noted earlier, that fear of standing armies as in herently opposed to republicanism went back through Harrington and Machiavelli (himself a militia organizer) to Roman historians such as Tacitus. See Pocock, Machiavellian Moment , passim.

81. Smith, New Age, I, 131–132.

82. Solomon Lutnick, The American Revolution and the British Press, 1775–1783 , 124–125, and Smith, New Age , II 1068–1074.

83. The episode of the Carlisle Peace Commission might, in some ways, be considered the first "credibility gap" in American history. Up to that point, one cannot but be struck by the extent to which action any dialogue in the American revolutionary coalition—despite the fact that it is, after all, the function of leaders to lead—had an enormously grass roots quality. As writers such as Knollenberg and Jensen note, the radicalness of the populace sometimes outran the leadership. In a sense, 1778 was a turning point, for, having established the legitimacy of the Revolutionary consensus around independence, the leadership now demonstrated less willingness to discuss specific alternatives which would require sacrifice for goals beyond this basic consensus.

84. Shy, "Military Conflict," in People , 216–217.

85. Despite a rather cool assessment by Shy, I find the Leiby volume a gold mine of information about the dynamics of revolutionary war in a contested area. A twenty page case study-summary is in William Marina, The American Revolution as a People's War , forthcoming.

86. Goetschius understood that such irregular forces fought best in defending their home area.

87. John Ellis, Armies in Revolution , 170; and Carroll Quigley notes:

The hope of the future does not rest, as commonly believed, in winning the peoples of the "buffer fringe" to one superpower or the other, but rather in the invention of new weapons and new tactics that will be so cheap to obtain and so easy to use that they will increase the effectiveness of guerrilla warfare so greatly that the employment of our present weapons of mass destruction will become futile and, on this basis, there can be a revival of democracy and of political decentralization in all three parts of our present world.

The Evolution of Civilizations , 259.

88. Quoted in Herbert Aptheker, Early Years of the Republic: From the End of the Revolution to the First Administration of Washington, (1783–1793) , Vol. III of A History of the American People , 14.

89. Lee Benson, Turner & Beard: American Historical Writing Reconsidered , 215; Charles A. Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States .

90. Benson, 219–220, 221, 217.

91. Benson, 227.

92. See Moore, Social Origins , for a good discussion of Catonism.

93. Wood, Creation , 70.

94 . Wood, Creation , 70–71.

95. Wood, Creation , 72. Wood comments further: "By the middle of the eighteenth century the peculiarities of social development in the New World had created an extraordinary society, remarkably equal yet simultaneously unequal, a society so contradictory in its nature that it left contemporaries puzzled and later historians divided. [Wood cites, for example, Jackson Turner Main, The Social Structure of Revolutionary America ; and Robert E. and B. Katherine Brown, Virginia, 1705–1786; Democracy or Aristocracy? It was, as many observers noted, a society strangely in conflict with itself. On one hand, social distinctions and symbols of status were highly respected and intensely coveted, indeed, said one witness, even more greedily than by the English themselves. Americans, it seemed, were in 'one continued Race: in which everyone is endeavoring to distance all behind him; and to overtake or pass by, all before him.' Yet, on the other hand, Americans found all these displays of superiority of status particularly detestable, in fact 'more odious than in any other country.'" Had Wood studied comparative civilizations, he would not have found this such an "extraordinary" phenomenon. It is characteristic of the expansionistic phase of any civilization, especially with respect to frontier areas.

96. Gordon S. Wood, "Rhetoric and Reality in the American Revolution, William and Mary Quarterly , 3d ser. 23 (1966), which discusses especially Virginia, and Berthoff and Murrin, "Feudalism," examined at length above.

97. Wood, Creation , 79. The efforts of several "neo-conservatives" to eliminate the social tensions and ambiguities of equality/egalitarianism, and to create a consensus view of the American past, are implausible. Irving Kristol or Martin Diamond give the impression that egalitarianism was not present in the era of the Founding Fathers, who are portrayed as having a virtual agreement around a conservative Lockean view of political equality. See, for example, Martin Diamond, "The Idea of Equality: The View from the Founding," in Walter Nicgorski and Ronald Weber, eds., An Almost Chosen People: The Moral Aspirations of Americans , 19–37.

98. For a critique of some of Jensen's earlier views, see Richard Morris, The American Revolution Reconsidered , especially the chapter on "Confederation and Constitution."

99. William and Mary Quarterly 3d ser. 29 (January 1972): 49–80.

100. In Burton J. Williams, ed., Essays in Honor of James C. Malin , 192–220.

101. I hope to deal with this interpretation in much greater detail in The American Revolution as a People's War , forthcoming.

102. Jensen, Within America , 193.

103. Pole, Equality , 112–113, points out that under the Articles, retaining of "local preferences" meant that there was not equality for all citizens of the United States. Only a Constitution would guarantee the search for national institutions and identity. It is interesting that the areas of the coast and frontier that went heavily for the Constitution as described in Jackson Turner Main, The Anti-Federalists: Critics of the Constitution, 1781–1788 , were the same areas that Nelson, Tory , notes as the bastions of Loyalist strength. One suspects a large number of votes for the Constitution came from those formerly of Tory sympathy.

A model, useful for developing further the distinction between Locals and Cosmopolitans, is Jackson Turner Main, Political Parties Before the Constitution . Just one piece of evidence can be cited to show that Locals were not necessarily for small government: they tended to favor increasing the salaries of officials. This fits in with the notion of "new" men who saw expanding local and state government as a means for advancement.

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Schultz, John A. and Adair, Douglas, eds., The Spur of Fame: Dialogues of John Adams and Benjamin Rush 1805–1813 .

Schwoerer, Lois F. "The Literature of the Standing Army Controversy." Huntington Library Quarterly 28 (1964–1965) 187–212.

———. "No Standing Armies!" The Antiarmy Ideology in Seventeenth Century England . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1974.

Shalhope, Robert E. "Toward a Republican Synthesis: The Emergence of Republicanism in American Historiography." William and Mary Quarterly . 3d Series, 298 (January 1972): 49–80.

Shy, John. "The American Revolution: Military Conflict Considered as a Revolutionary War." In Essays on the American Revolution . Edited by Stephen G. Kurtz and James H. Hutson. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970.

———. "The American Revolution Today." In Military History of the American Revolution . Edited by Stanley J. Unterdal.

———. "Charles Lee: The Soldier as Radical." In George Washington's Generals . Edited by George Altan Billias. New York: William Morrow & Co., 1964.

———. A People Numerous and Armed: Reflections on the Military Struggle for American Independence . New York: Oxford University Press, 1976.

Skaggs, David Curtis. "Flaming Patriots and Inflaming Demogogues: The Role of the Maryland Militia in Revolutionary Society and Politics." In Essays in American History in Honor of James C. Malin . Edited by Burton J. Williams. Lawrence, Kansas: Coronado Press, 1973.

Skocpol, Theda. "A Critical Review of Barrington Moore's Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy." Politics and Society 4 (Fall 1973).

Smith, Page. Historians and History . New York: Vintage, 1964.

———. A New Age Begins: A People's History of the American Revolution . 2 Vols. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976.

Tolles, Frederick B. "The American Revolution Considered as a Social Movement: A Reevaluation." American Historical Review 60 (1954–1955): 1–12.

Trenchard, John, and Thomas Gordon. Cato's Letters . (4 Vols in 2) Reprint 1775 ed., New York, Da Capo Press, 1971.

Turner, Jr., John J. "The Revolution, the Founding Fathers, and the Electoral College." In West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences: The American Revolution: The Home Front 15 (June 1976) Carrollton, Georgia.

Uhlendorf, Bernard A., trans., Revolution in America: Confidential Letters and Journals, 1776–1784, of Adjutant General Major Baurmuster of the Hessian Forces . (Reprint of 1957 edition.) Hampdon, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1973.

Unterdal, Stanley J. Military History of the American Revolution . Colorado Springs: United States Air Force Academy, 1974.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Modern World System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of European World Economy in the Sixteenth Century . New York: Academic Press, 1974.

Weigley, Russel F. The Partisan War: The South Carolina Campaign of 1780–1782 . Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1971.

Wesson, Robert G. State Systems: International Pluralism in History . Forthcoming.

Wilhelm, Barbara R. "The American Revolution as a Leadership Crisis: The View of a Hardware Store Owner" in West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences: The American Revolution: The Home Front 15 (June 1976) Carrollton, Georgia.

Williams, Burton J., ed. Essays in American History in Honor of James C. Malin . Lawrence, Kansas: Coronado Press, 1973.

Williams, William Appleman. The Contours of American History . New York: Quadrangle Books, 1966.

Wise, Gene. American Historical Explanations: A Strategy for Grounded Inquiry . Homewood, Illinois: The Dorsey Press, 1973.

Wood, Gordon S. The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970.

———. "Rhetoric and Reality in the American Revolution." William and Mary Quarterly 3d Series (1966) 31.

Wood, Jr., Jerome H. "'There Ought To Be No Distinction': The American Revolution and the Powerless" in West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences: The American Revolution: The Home Front 15 (June 1976) Carrollton, Georgia.

Yoder, Dale. "Current Definitions of Revolution." American Journal of Sociology 32 (November 1926).

Young, Alfred F., ed. The American Revolution: Exploration in the History of American Radicalism . Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1976.

———. The Democratic Republicans of New York: The Origins 1763–1797 . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967.

Zagorin, Perez. The Court and the Country: The Beginning of the English Revolution . New York: Athaneum, 1971.

———. "Theories of Revolution in Contemporary Historiography." Political Science Quarterly 88 (1973) 28–29.

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The Second American Revolution: Its Impact and Legacy

The problems the united states had with paying debts after the revolutionary war, the boston siege: american revolution war, the context of the american revolutionary war from a historical perspective, the features that contribute to the unique character of the american revolutionary war, the difference between american and french revolutions, the battle of saratoga, insurgency and asymmetric warfare in the american revolutionary war  , joseph plumb martin and his role in the revolutionary war, war on the colonies: french, indian war and american revolution, what influenced the patriots' win in the revolutionary war, causes of the american revolution: political, economic and ideolodical, an analytical dive into the battle of yorktown, women's participation in the american revolutionary war, rhetorical devices in patrick henry's speech, the pros and cons of the articles of confederation.

April 19, 1775 – September 3, 1783

Eastern North America, North Atlantic Ocean, the West Indies

Battle of Brandywine, Battle of Bunker Hill, Battle of Monmouth, Battles of Saratoga, Battle of Bemis Heights

United States War of Independence, Revolutionary War

Before the flare-up of the American Revolutionary War, there had been growing tensions and conflicts between the British crown and its thirteen colonies. Attempts by the British government to raise revenue by taxing the colonies met with heated protest among many colonists. The Stamp Act and Townshend Acts provoked colonial opposition and unrest, leading to the 1770 Boston Massacre and 1773 Boston Tea Party.

By June 1776, a growing majority of the colonists had come to favor independence from Britain. On July 4, the Continental Congress voted to adopt the Declaration of Independence drafted largely by Thomas Jefferson.

In March 1776, the British led by General William Howe retreated to Canada to prepare for a major invasion of New York. A large British fleet was sent to New York with the aim to crush the rebellion. Routed by Howe’s Redcoats on Long Island, Washington’s troops were forced to evacuate from New York City. However, the surprise attack in Trenton and the battle near Princeton, New Jersey after that, marked another small victory for the colonials and revived the flagging hopes of the rebels.

British strategy in 1777 involved two main prongs of attack aimed at separating New England from the other colonies. Following the American victory in Battle of Saratoga, France and America signed treaties of alliance on February 6, 1778, in which France provided America with troops and warships.

On September 3, 1783, the Treaty of Paris, signed in Paris by Great Britain and by the United States of America, officially ended the American Revolutionary War.

Britain recognized the United States of America as an independent country. The Constitution was written in 1787 to amend the weak Articles of Confederation and it organized the basic political institutions and formed the three branches of government: judicial, executive, and legislative.

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Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Essays

Post-revolutionary america: 1800–1840.

Mrs. Manigault Heyward (Susan Hayne Simmons)

Robert Fulton

Charles-Honoré Lannuier

Presentation Vase

Thomas Fletcher

De Witt Clinton

Samuel F. B. Morse

Cameo by George W. Jamison

Andrew Jackson

William H. Rumney

David Jaffee Department of History, City College and Graduate Center, CUNY

The United States became a continental nation with the purchase of Louisiana from France in 1803 and the settlement of the lands beyond the Appalachian Mountains. Westward expansion fueled conflict with Native populations and led to their forced removal. By 1820, 2 million Americans lived west of the Appalachians, out of a total national population of 10 million. The regional cultures that had developed along the Atlantic Coast—New England, Middle Atlantic, Chesapeake, and Carolinas—were transplanted into the Old Northwest (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin) and the Old Southwest (Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Tennessee, and Texas). But although Americans had begun to identify themselves as a nation, they were divided by sectional interests that deepened with rapid industrialization and the question of slavery .

Americans steadily achieved economic independence from Europe. Rural Americans, once exclusively farmers, began manufacturing, merchants constructed regional market economies, and state governments promoted economic development. Industrialists remade rural villages into burgeoning factory towns such as Lowell, Massachusetts, the center of cotton textile manufacture. However, many textiles continued to be made in individual households and small weaving workshops. Mill owners called upon machines and factory operatives to boost production. Government leaders and entrepreneurs campaigned for the construction of canals and railroads that helped create a vast national market. Robert Fulton’s (1765–1815; 14.135 ) steamboat, the Clermont , made its first trip up the Hudson River in 1807. The old Atlantic port cities—Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore—continued to grow with the opening of trade to China in 1785. But New York’s rise was phenomenal, with its great harbor, its growing financial infrastructure, and the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 ( 1982.4a, b )—promoted by New York Governor DeWitt Clinton (1769–1828; 09.18 )—connecting the metropolis with the interior of the country.

Generally factories rose in the countryside next to the banks of rapidly moving streams and rivers that provided water power to turn large wheels for machinery. Remarkable changes occurred within urban workshops. Some artisans exchanged the workbench for the role of manufacturer or businessman, producing more goods by dividing up the tasks by which objects such as chairs and silver are created; as workers specialized in particular aspects of production, the operation became more efficient. Many traditionally trained mechanics and other craftsmen who had expected to rise up the ladder from apprentice to journeyman, and then master, found their social position threatened by these developments. Furniture makers began to maintain well-stocked warehouses of Federal or Neoclassical furniture ( 1995.377.1 ). Wealth no longer derived exclusively from landownership. Urban families with great fortunes from new sources—merchants, factory owners, financiers—patronized the workshops of urban cabinetmakers, silversmiths, and other skilled craftsmen.

The political calm that had characterized the first term of President George Washington (1732–1799) was soon disrupted by the rise of party conflict between the Federalists and the Republicans. The presidency of Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) launched a quarter century of Republican rule, interrupted by another war with Great Britain, the War of 1812. The geographic confrontation over slavery would not be resolved by the Missouri Compromise in 1820, which maintained a sectional balance between southern and northern states in the U.S. Senate and set boundaries for slavery in the lands of the Louisiana Purchase. Change also fueled a process of political democratization—an expansion of the white male population able to vote and hold office—leading to the rise of Andrew Jackson (1767–1845; 1978.57 ; 2000.562 ) and the new Democratic Party. Foreign observers such as the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) remarked on the democratic character of American society, where families moved frequently and individuals were liberated from the restraints of tradition and hierarchy.

Cultural independence proved harder to achieve. Despite the great focus on nature in American society, tastemakers continued to look abroad for classical and then revival styles . While folk painters roamed rural areas to provide portraits for middling Americans, the European tour and grand historical themes remained critical to the work of academic painters and sculptors . At the same time, new cultural institutions on home soil provided opportunities for artists to study and exhibit. The artistic career of Samuel F. B. Morse (1791–1872) is exemplary. He began as a rural portraitist, took the Grand Tour of European capitals and art collections, and, upon returning to New York, sought commissions for high-style portraits and historical studies. In 1825, he co-founded the National Academy of Design and served as its first president.

Jaffee, David. “Post-Revolutionary America: 1800–1840.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History . New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/pram/hd_pram.htm (April 2007)

Further Reading

Bushman, Richard L. The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities . New York: Knopf, 1992.

Staiti, Paul J. Samuel F. B. Morse . New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America (1835–40) . New York: Library of America, 2004.

Additional Essays by David Jaffee

• Jaffee, David. “ America Comes of Age: 1876–1900 .” (April 2007)
• Jaffee, David. “ Industrialization and Conflict in America: 1840–1875 .” (April 2007)
• Jaffee, David. “ Art and Identity in the British North American Colonies, 1700–1776 .” (October 2004)
• Jaffee, David. “ Art and Society of the New Republic, 1776–1800 .” (October 2004)
• Jaffee, David. “ Religion and Culture in North America, 1600–1700 .” (October 2004)

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Artist or Maker

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Slavery, Abolition, Emancipation and Freedom

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Reconstruction, 1865-1877

Donald Brown, Harvard University, G6, English PhD Candidate

No period in American history has had more wide-reaching implications than Reconstruction. However, white supremacist mythologies about those contentious years from 1865-1877 reigned supreme both inside and outside the academy until the 1960s. Columbia University’s now-infamous Dunning School (1900-1930) epitomizes the dominant narrative regarding Reconstruction for over half of the twentieth century. From their point of view, Reconstruction was a tragic period of American history in which vengeful White Northern radicals took over the South. In order to punish the White Southerners they had just defeated in the Civil War, these Radical Republicans gave ignorant freedmen the right to vote. This resulted in at least 2,000 elected Black officeholders, including two United States senators and 21 representatives. In order to discredit the sweeping changes taking place across the American South, conservative historians argued this period was full of corruption and disorder and proved that Black Americans were not fit to leadership or citizenship.

Thanks to the work of a number of Black and leftist historians—most notably John Roy Lynch, W.E.B. Du Bois, Willie Lee Rose, and Eric Foner—that negative depiction of Reconstruction is being overturned. As Du Bois famously wrote in Black Reconstruction in America (1935), this was a time in which “the slave went free; stood for a brief moment in the sun; and then moved back again toward slavery.” During that short time in the sun, underfunded biracial state governments taxed big planters to pay for education, healthcare, and roads that benefited everyone. There is still much more to be unpacked from this rich period of American history, and Houghton Library contains a wealth of material to further buttress new narratives of that era.

Reconstructing Reconstruction

While some academics, like those of the Dunning School, interpreted Reconstruction as doomed to failure, in the years immediately following the Civil War there were many Americans, Black and White, who saw the radical reforms as being sabotaged from the outset. Writer and civil rights activist Albion W. Tourgée published his best selling novel Bricks Without Straw in 1880. Unlike most White authors at the time, Tourgée centered Black characters in his novel, showing how the recently emancipated were faced with violence and political oppression in spite of their attempts to be equal citizens.

In this period, two of the most iconic amendments were implemented. The Fourteenth Amendment ratified several crucial civil rights clauses. The natural born citizenship clause overturned the 1857 supreme court case, Dred Scott v. Sandford , which stated that descendants of African slaves could not be citizens of the United States. The equal protection clause ensured formerly enslaved persons crucial legal rights and validated the equality provisions contained in the Civil Rights Act of 1866. Even though many of these clauses were cleverly disregarded by numerous states once Reconstruction ended, particularly in the Deep South, the equal protection clause was the basis of the NAACP’s victory in the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). The Fifteenth Amendment guaranteed another important civil right: the right to vote. No longer could any state discriminate on the basis of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. At Houghton, we have proof of the exhilarating response Black Americans had to the momentous progress they worked so hard to bring about: Nashvillians organized a Fifteenth Amendment Celebration on May 4, 1870. And once again, during the classical period of the Civil Rights Movement, leaders appealed to this amendment to make their case for what became the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The Reign of Kings Alpha and Abadon

Lorenzo D. Blackson's fantastical allegory novel, The Rise and Progress of the Kingdoms of Light & Darkness ; Reign of Kings Alpha and Abadon (1867), is one of the most ambitious creative efforts of Black authors during Reconstruction. A Protestant religious allegory in the lineage of John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress , Blackson's novel follows his vision of a holy war between good and evil, showing slavery and racial oppression on the side of evil King Abadon and Protestant abolitionists and freemen on the side of good King Alpha. The combination of fantasy holy war, religious pedagogy, and Reconstruction era optimism provide a unique insight to one contemporary Black perspective on the time.

It is important to emphasize that these radical policy initiatives were set by Black Americans themselves. It was, in fact, from formerly enslaved persons, not those who formerly enslaved them, that the most robust notions of freedom were imagined and enacted. With the help of the nation’s first civil rights president, Ulysses S. Grant (1869-1877), and Radical Republicans, such as Benjamin Franklin Wade and Thaddeus Stevens, substantial strides in racial advancement were made in those short twelve years. Houghton Library is home to a wide array of examples of said advancement, such as a letter written in 1855 by Frederick Douglass to Charles Sumner, the nation’s leading abolitionist. In it, he argues that Black Americans, not White abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison, founded the antislavery movement. That being said, Douglass was appreciative of allies, such as President Grant, of whom he said: “in him the Negro found a protector, the Indian a friend, a vanquished foe a brother, an imperiled nation a savior.” Houghton Library also houses an extraordinary letter dated December 1, 1876 from Sojourner Truth , famous abolitionist and women’s rights activist, who could neither read nor write. She had someone help steady her hand so she could provide a signed letter to a fan, and promised to also send her supporter an autobiography, Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Bondswoman of Olden Time, Emancipated by the New York Legislature in the Early Part of the Present Century: with a History of Her Labors and Correspondence.

In this hopeful time, Black Americans, primarily located in the South, were determined to use their demographic power to demand their right to a portion of the wealth and property their labor had created. In states like South Carolina and Mississippi, which were majority Black at the time, and Louisiana , Alabama, and Georgia , with Black Americans consisting of nearly half of the population, the United States elected its first Black U.S. congressmen. Now that Black Southern men had the power to vote, they eagerly elected Black men to represent their best interests. Jefferson Franklin Long (U.S. congressman from Georgia), Joseph Hayne Rainey (U.S. congressman from South Carolina), and Hiram Rhodes Revels (Mississippi U.S. Senator) all took office in the 41st Congress (1869-1871). These elected officials were memorialized in a lithograph by popular firm Currier and Ives. Other federal agencies, such as the Freedmen’s Bureau , also assisted Black Americans build businesses, churches, and schools; own land and cultivate crops; and more generally establish cultural and economic autonomy. As Frederick Douglass wrote in 1870, “at last, at last the black man has a future.”

Black Americans quickly took full advantage of their newfound freedom in a myriad of ways. Alfred Islay Walden’s story is a particularly remarkable example of this. Born a slave in Randolph County, North Carolina, he only gained freedom after Emancipation. He traveled by foot to Washington, D.C. and made a living selling poems and giving lectures across the Northeast. He also attended school at Howard University on scholarship, graduating in 1876, and used that formal education to establish a mission school and become one of the first Black graduates of New Brunswick Theological Seminary. Walden’s Miscellaneous Poems, Which The Author Desires to Dedicate to The Cause of Education and Humanity (1872) celebrates the “Impeachment of President Johnson,” one of the most racist presidents in American history; “The Election of Mayor Bowen,” a Radical Republican mayor of Washington, D.C. (Sayles Jenks Bowen); and Walden’s own religious convictions, such as in “Jesus my Friend;” among other topics.

Black newspapers quickly emerged during Reconstruction as well, such as the Colored Representative , a Black newspaper based in Lexington, KY in the 1870s. As editor George B. Thomas wrote in an “Extra,” dated May 25, 1871 : “We want all the arts and fashions of the North, East and Western states, for the benefit of the colored people. They cannot know what is going on, unless they read our paper.... Now, we want everything that is a benefit to our colored people. Speeches, debates, and sermons will be published.”

Reconstruction proves that Black people, when not impeded by structural barriers, are enthusiastic civic participants. Houghton houses rich archival material on Black Americans advocating for civil rights in Vicksburg, Mississippi , Little Rock, Arkansas , and Atlanta, Georgia , among other states, in the forms of state Colored Conventions and powerful political speeches . For anyone interested in the long history of the Civil Rights Movement, these holdings are a treasure trove waiting to be mined. Though the moment in the sun was brief, the heat exuded during Reconstruction left a deep impact on progressive Americans and will continue to provide an exemplary political model for generations to come.

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View of the Kremlin and surrounding area from 1825. From The Album of Ancient Views of the Moscow Kremlin , by Ivan Zabelin. Available online from the Yeltsin Library .

The Kremlin: Moscow’s Historical Heart Through the Ages

Published: December 3, 2021

The Moscow Kremlin has long been the main symbol of Moscow and Russia – and for good reason. It was with the Kremlin that city of Moscow officially began and from which it grew. The Prince of Moscow, ruling from the Kremlin and drawing on the growing power of his city, united and conquered the cities and lands around him to create Russia.

While the Kremlin can be seen as something of a constant in Russian history, the Kremlin itself has seen major changes within its walls and to its own status. It has lost and gained buildings. It has changed from the seat of government to an ancillary structure, back to the governmental seat, and finally to a museum complex.

The resource below unites the work of multiple SRAS students writing on Home and Abroad , Challenge Grants , and Online Research Internships to bring you an overarching view of this iconic complex.

The Kremlin Walls

By Hudson Dobbs

The Kremlin was first established in 1156 by Prince Yuri Dolgorukiy. This post-dates the first mention of Moscow, which dates back to 1147, when Prince Dolgorukiy invited Prince Sviatoslav of Chernigov to Moscow to celebrate their alliance.

The actual site of this stronghold has likely been occupied since the second millennium BCE. It likely had fortifications built there as early as the 10th century, by the then-resident Vyatichi, a tribe of Slavic peoples.

Eventually, Prince Dolgorukiy ordered the construction of what would become the Kremlin walls. These first walls were tall and expansive and built out of wood. Although this structure was built for protection, it also served as a symbol for the power and strength of the new city of Moscow.

While the first walls did their job well, they were eventually burnt down by Tatar-Mongol forces and later upgraded to more fire-resistant oak in 1339. As the city grew, the Kremlin also further developed, and with it the popularity of building fortresses in town centers. Cities such as Smolensk, Kazan, Novgorod, and Pskov all constructed a Kremlin of their own. In fact, the word “kremlin” simply means “a fortress within a city.”

By the 13th century, the Kremlin housed the political and spiritual power of the state, with residences, workshops, churches, and state buildings all residing within its walls. In the 1360’s, Prince Dmitry Donskoy rebuilt the walls in limestone and a gleaming white Kremlin soon became the iconic image of Moscow. These walls were credited in helping the city defend itself from sieges by Grand Duke Algirdas of Lithuania in the late 1360’s.

The walls and towers that exist today are still another iteration, and were built on the order of Grand Prince Ivan III, also known as Ivan the Great, from 1485 to 1495. Ivan wanted to build something grander and more worthy of being his residence – something that would be comparable to Constantinople in terms of size and importance.

Wanting what would be specifically a “Third Rome,” Ivan invited Italian architects such as Aristotele Fioravanti and Pietro Antonio Solari. Their involvement is why the current fortress closely resembles castles of Northern Italy. Its red brick made the Kremlin unique for the time, as it was the first structure in Russia built from such material.

These brick walls have stood, with minor adjustments, since that time. One noticeable change came in the late 1600s, when Tsar Fyodor Alekseevich ordered the red brick to be whitewashed in limestone, returning it to gleaming white the city had been hitherto known for. Eventually, the whitewash stopped being maintained and was allowed to wear off, a process that was complete by the 1900s.

Grand Kremlin Palace Tour

By Jack Fisher

Formerly the Moscow residence of the Russian tsars, the Grand Kremlin Palace (not to be confused with the State Kremlin Palace) is a complex inside the Kremlin. It now hosts diplomatic meetings and official state ceremonies including presidential inaugurations. It is also designated as a residence of the President of the Russian Federation, but is rarely used for that purpose.

When SRAS gave me the opportunity to take an exclusive tour of this complex, which is an exclusive tour that is normally off-limits to the general public, I had to take it.

This particular tour is different from those that cover the more public areas inside the Kremlin and requires signing up early and submitting your documents for a security check.

I met the tour group on a Friday afternoon in Aleksandrovski Sad, which borders the Kremlin walls. From there, we made our way towards the Kremlin grounds entrance. There was a huge line to get into the grounds through a first security checkpoint, but we were able to skip straight to the front of it since we had registered for our tour ahead of time. Once we were through the gate, the crowd thinned out significantly.

As we walked through the Kremlin grounds, we saw other tour groups taking photos of the landscaping, palace, and other historical buildings. Unlike us, they didn’t have the permission of the Russian government to enter the actual palace. When we got to the palace, we walked through the front doors, crossed a second security checkpoint, met our guide, and started the tour.

Our tour guide inside the building was a woman that worked in preservation. She only spoke Russian, so everything was translated for us by an SRAS-hired guide to English. We began on the first floor of the newer section of the palace and saw several ornate living rooms and guest rooms, followed by the empress’s and emperor’s chambers. Unfortunately, we weren’t allowed to see the emperor’s office and bathroom as President Putin had decided to use them as his personal study for the remainder of his time in office.

After the first floor, we headed upstairs to the second. From the outside the palace appeared to have three floors, but in reality the second floor just had massive, vaulted ceilings and two levels of windows. From what I saw, the second floor seemed to be where the fun happened. The first major room we walked into was the Hall of the Order of St. George, built to house major military meetings and balls and today used as a large conference room. There were names of famous military officers and soldiers inscribed on the walls, and the hall looked like it could hold hundreds of guests. Then it was on to the Hall of the Order of St. Vladimir, which was way less cool. It did, however, have the largest chandelier in the palace, for what that’s worth.

Next, we moved into the oldest section of the palace. It was built in the late 1400s and the newer sections of the palace were built out to connect with it. Our guide told us that by the time of the last czars, the older section was used strictly for ceremonial purposes. The walls were covered with paintings of historical rulers and religious figures. It was definitely my favorite room as there seemed to be an aura of timelessness hanging about the place.

Then we went back through the Hall of the Order of St. Vladimir and through another hall to the older bedchamber of the czar and an older, smaller meeting room for the czar and his nobles. This section was markedly different as there was none of the opulence of the newer palace. It had a utilitarian feel due to its practical layout with comfortable but plain looking chairs, reasonably sized paintings, low ceilings and large traditional Russian stoves.

Finally, we visited the throne room. It was massive, just like the Hall of the Order of St. George, and had polished stone and gilding everywhere. Unfortunately, it was a reconstruction. Our guide let us know that the soviets had torn it apart when they came to power, creating what looked like a massive classroom to house the first meetings of the Soviet Congress. The Russian government had restored it completely within the past decade. She also let us know that the current heir to the Russian throne is Prince Harry of England, which is an interesting fact I’ve been surprising Brits with lately.

On our way out, we exited through a portrait hall. Most of the portraits were typical Enlightenment and Victorian era paintings with stuffy looking people. However, one painting caught my eye: the portrait of Knyaz Sbyatoclav. The man looked absolutely hardcore (and you can see him below in a photo I took).

In my opinion, it was definitely worth $75. While I wouldn’t go twice, the fact of the matter is that you get to see the inside of a beautiful building and stand in rooms that very powerful people meet in and have met in for hundreds of years – which is an opportunity that few regular people are given. Don’t think that it’s too expensive, because you’ll have the experience and memory with you for the rest of your life.

The Kremlin Without a Capital (1712-1918)

By Lee Sullivan

The Kremlin has always been a symbol of Russian power and authority. It is often used interchangeably with the Russian state in journalism and academic literature. This is not surprising considering the Kremlin is situated in the heart of Moscow and has typically housed Russian rulers and their offices – and continues to contain an official residence and office for Russian president Vladimir Putin. However, not all of Russia’s leaders have always called the Moscow fortress home. This article covers the nearly 200 years of Kremlin history when Moscow was not the capital.

Peter the Great moved Russia’s capital from Moscow to St. Petersburg in 1712. Despite the continued crowning of tsars in the Annunciation Cathedral and symbols of power in the Kremlin vaults, Moscow’s role in state life was minimal compared to that of the new capital. This changed when a new stage of construction began under Catherine the Great. Even though St. Petersburg was the new capital, she was crowned in Moscow following ancient tradition. A commission to replace the code of laws from Tsar Alexey Mikhailovich’s time was called in Moscow and its session was held in the Kremlin’s Faceted Palace. This was a sign that under Catherine the Great the state would be ruled from both St. Petersburg and Moscow. Additionally, the Senate was divided into departments under Catherine. Four were in St. Petersburg and two were in the newly commissioned Senate Building, which still stands in the Moscow Kremlin.

Catherine additionally planned a grand reconstruction of the Kremlin interior, one that would have seen most of its buildings demolished, save for the historic cluster of churches, and replaced with modern imperial architecture built with long, straight roads, much like St. Petersburg itself. Demolition was started, including to parts of the original Kremlin walls, when cracks began to appear in one of the cathedral walls due to the resulting disruption of the soil. Because of this, and because of the project’s already enormous cost, it was cancelled, and the original walls re-built.

In September of 1812, French troops occupied Moscow. Napoleon, who led them, planned to occupy the Kremlin as his residence. It is widely thought that in defense against the French, the Moscow mayor ordered fires be set across the city. They raged for days so and were so intense that Napoleon was forced to leave the Kremlin due to the smoke. Upon returning he declared an intention to remain in the Kremlin for winter and ordered additional fortification of the Kremlin walls. However, the French army was weakening due to battle loss and poor supply.

Napoleon ordered his troops to retreat and blow up the Kremlin in the process. Mines were laid but their effectiveness was reduced by rain and prompt Muscovite response. Still, considerable damage was done, including to the Vodozvodnaya Tower, which was completely destroyed.

The Kremlin quickly underwent restoration under Tsar Alexander I and Nicolas I. Despite the war’s considerable drain on state funding, Tsar Alexander I prioritized restoring many parts of the Kremlin including towers, walls, palaces, and cathedrals. He often traveled to Moscow to observe the restoration progress. Many of Russia’s best architects were included in the restoration efforts. Order was progressively restored to the Kremlin and new gardens, now called the Alexander Gardens, were laid out along its exterior. Buildings like the Senate were brought back to their original appearance.

Restoration was completed under Nicholas I, who gave special attention to the restoration of ancient Kremlin churches and other old buildings. He also commissioned the construction of new buildings like the Great Kremlin Palace, after having the old one demolished. The entire imperial family attended the palace blessing during an official ceremony in April 1849. It was constructed and designed with techniques that were ahead of their time – vaulted construction for walls and ceilings, inlaid stone floors, and iron rafters.

Shortly after the revolution, the Communists restored Moscow as the official capital in 1918 when Moscow was reinstated as Russia’s capital. Construction and restoration were completed by the mid-19 th century. During the Soviet years, the Kremlin housed Soviet leaders and saw the development and then dissolution of the Soviet state. Today the Kremlin stands in Russia’s capital as a unique architectural ensemble.

The Kremlin Under the Soviets

The new Bolshevik government made sweeping changes to the historic Kremlin complex to, as they saw it, better represent the character of the new socialist state.

During the revolution of November 1917, the Kremlin was ransacked, leaving it with broken glass, destroyed icons, and parts of the complex in disrepair. Restoration of the walls and towers began in 1918, but further restoration stalled for lack of funding and because the communists had not yet decided on a plan for their changes to their seat of government.

The first targets were churches and royal symbols. Nuns and monks who had long lived in the Kremlin were removed. Churches had valuables removed and transferred to the new Commissariat of Finances to fund state projects. Many royal treasures and even crown jewels were similarly transferred. The double-headed eagles on the top of the buildings were promptly removed.

Many buildings were repurposed. Initially, many were converted to housing for Communist functionaries as the revolution and war had depleted Moscow’s housing stock while driving immigration from the countryside to the city. At one point, over two thousand people lived inside the Kremlin. By 1939, however, Kremlin residents consisted of only about three dozen high ranking officials.

Other notable repurposings included turning the Palace of Facets into a canteen with its kitchen inside the Tsarina’s Golden Chamber. The Ivan the Great Bell Tower was turned into a workshop, the Small Nicholas Palace became a worker’s club, and a gym was placed in the Church of St. Catherine. In 1932, the Andrew and Alexander Halls within the palace were gutted to make room for a party congress.

Many of the buildings and statues within the complex were destroyed, often to make way for new construction; only 26 of the original 54 buildings survived the Soviet period. The Chudov Monastery and Ascension Convent were both destroyed to make way for a military academy and eventually the Kremlin Presidium was built on the ground to house the Supreme Soviet, the supreme legislative body of the USSR.

In 1929, the Maly Nikolaevsky Palace, a former royal residence, was replaced by a new administrative building.

In the 1920s, the Russian royals buried in the Archangel Cathedral on the Kremlin’s Cathedral Square were exhumed and autopsied. They and the items in their sarcophagi were turned over to the Kremlin museum. Some valuable artifacts were requisitioned to the state treasury.

In 1935, five stars of rubied glass replaced the double-headed eagles that once topped the Kremlin gate towers.

Throughout WWII, the Kremlin was disguised under mock construction and painted roofs. Despite this, several bombs still fell on the Kremlin grounds, but did not cause major damage.

In 1947, Stalin painted the Kremlin walls red in an unmistakable ode to socialism, a drastic change from the traditional white that the walls had carried for centuries.

In 1955, the Kremlin opened to the public as an open air museum. In that same year, a ban on living in the Kremlin was introduced, lessening any security risk opening it to the public might create.

The last wave of demolitions came in 1958-1961, when the Palace of Congresses, built to house the congresses of Communist Party and cultural events, replaced the Old Amoury and part of the Patriarch’s Palace.

In part due to the outcry from this massive renovation, greater care of the Kremlin grounds began. The official Kremlin museum system was established in 1966, and Elena Gagarin, daughter of Yuri Gagarin, was hired as museum director. Today, that system includes the large armoury, several churches, and items outside of the Kremlin, such as St. Basil’s Cathedral.

The changes made during the Soviet period have left the Kremlin with a striking architectural contrast between traditional, tsarist-era architecture with Soviet-style buildings and the iconic, ancient red walls and remaining cathedrals. Despite the destruction and changes that were carried out, the compound still offers an unforgettable look into Russian and Soviet history that is impossible to get from anywhere else.

The Kremlin Stars

Translated by Caroline Barrow

The following was originally posted to the the Russian 7 website . It has been translated here by SRAS Home and Abroad Translation Scholar Caroline Barrow. Additional edits and updates were applied in 2021.

On October 24, 1935, two long-standing symbols of the Russian monarchy—the two-headed eagles which stood on top of the Kremlin towers, were ordered to be brought down and replaced with five-pointed stars.

Why a five-pointed star became the symbol of the Soviet regime is unknown, but what is known is that Lev Trotsky supported this symbol. Greatly fascinated by the esoteric, he knew that stars and pentagrams have a strong energetic potential and are one of the strongest symbols. The swastika could have easily become the symbol of the new government, since it had a strong following in Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century. Swastikas were displayed on the currency of the temporary government led by Alexander Kerensky, and swastikas were painted on the walls of Empress Alexandra Fedrovna’s Ipatiev House before the royal family was executed there. This swastika trend was stopped almost solely by Trotsky and the Bolsheviks, who opted for the five-pointed star. The history of the twentieth century even showed that stars are stronger than swastikas… Stars shone over the Kremlin, in the place of two-headed eagle.

Erecting the thousand-kilogram stars on the Kremlin towers was not a simple thing to do. The problem was that the needed technology did not exist in 1935. The smallest of the Kremlin Towers, Borovitskaya, rose to 52 meters, and the tallest tower, Troitskaya, reached a height of 72 meters. Throughout the country, there were no tower cranes capable of reaching these heights. However, for Russian engineers, the word “no” did not exist, only the phrase “we must.” Engineers designed and built special cranes that could be installed on the upper deck for each tower. A metal base, called the console, was mounted at the base of each turret window, and on each console the engineers mounted a lifting crane. Thus, the process occurred in several stages: first the two-headed eagles were dismantled, and second, the stars erected.

Each star weighs about one ton. Given the height at which the stars would be placed and the fact that each star has a surface area of 6.3 square meters (potentially excellent for catching the wind), there was a danger that the stars might be blown away along with the top of the towers. So, it was decided to stress test the towers and, it turns out, with good reason: the upper part of each tower and its console was completely destroyed in the process. So, builders reinforced the masonry at the upper levels of the towers, and for the Spasskaya, Troitskaya, and Borovitskaya Tower, metal bracing was added to the base of the tower. The console on Nikolskaya Tower was so damaged that it had to be completely rebuilt.

All the stars were not made identical; four stars differ from one another in their artistic forms. On the Spasskaya Tower star, rays go out from the center. However, on Troitskaya Tower’s star, the rays look like spikes. The star on Borovitskaya Tower is made up of two contours, one inscribed in the other, and, finally, the rays on Nikolskaya Tower’s star have no pattern. In terms of length, the Spasskaya and Nikolskaya Towers were similar, with the distance between the ends of the rays being about 4.5 meters. On Troitskaya and Borovitskaya Towers, the star rays were shorter, and the distance between the ends of the rays was less, measuring 4 and 3.4 meters, respectively.

A star is good, but a spinning star is twice as nice. Moscow is large, its people many, and all must see the Kremlin stars. For the base of each star, special bearings were produced by the First Bearing Plant. These special bearings allow the stars to rotate with the wind even despite their significant weight. Consequently, it is possible to know the direction of the wind given the position of the stars.

Installation of the Kremlin Stars was a true celebration for Muscovites. The stars were not carried under the cover of night to Red Square. The day before the stars were placed on the towers they were put on display in Gorky Park. District and City Secretaries of the Communist Party came together with the ordinary mortals below to see the stars. The stars were lit from the outside to make the Ural stones shine and the rays sparkle. The eagles, taken off the towers, were also displayed to visually demonstrate the dilapidation of the “old” world and the beauty of the “new” world.

The Kremlin stars were not always ruby glass. The first stars, installed in October, 1935, were made from high-alloy stainless steel and red copper. In the center of each star, on both sides, the stars were embedded with precious stones outlining the hammer and sickle emblem. Over the course of a year, the glitter of the gems dimmed. The stars were also found to be too big, not fitting well with the architectural ensemble. In May, 1937, it was decided to install new, illuminated glass ruby stars. Also, they added a star to a fifth tower, the Vodovzvodnaya Tower. The ruby glass was produced at a factory in the city of Konstantinov, according to the method of the Moscovite glassmaker, N. I. Kurochkina. It was necessary to prepare 500 square meters of ruby glass, and for that, a new type was invented—selenium ruby glass. Before that, gold was used to color the glass; selenium was cheaper and produced a deeper color.

The Kremlin stars don’t only rotate, they also light up. In order not to overheat and cause damage, about 600 cubic meters of air is blown through the stars per hour. The stars are not affected by power outages, because they have their own, independent generators.

For the original lighting, the Moscow Electrical Lamp Plant produced the lights for the stars. The stars on Spasskaya, Troitskaya, and Nikolskaya Towers all had 5000-watt bulbs, and the other two operated at 3700 watts. In each star, two parallel filaments were installed. That way, if one burned out, the other filament still shone and a control panel is was notified of the burnout.

To change a bulb, one need not need to climb up to the star. Rather, the bulb comes down on a special rod that runs straight through the bearing. The whole process takes 30-35 minutes. In the stars’ history, the stars stopped shining only twice—once during the war, and another time for the filming of the now-classic movie The Barber of Siberia .

Editorial Note: Update 2021. Starting in 2015, the lighting of the Kremlin stars was updated with one star’s lighting system replaced each year. The old incandescent lamps were replaced with modern metal halide lamps. These lamps are approximately four times more energy efficient than the old bulbs and provide a more intense, higher-quality light. Metal halide lamps are often used for sports stadiums and other places where strong, high-quality light is needed.

In preparation for this switch, Employees of the Central Scientific and Restoration Design Workshops (TsNRPM) measured the illumination of each arm of each star separately to make sure that each would still be lit evenly and brightly. They also created models of the stars lit with various methods including LED matrices and optical fiber. In the end, metal halide was determined to be the closest in historical appearance to the existing incandescent lamps.

Within this update, each star was also given its first compressive maintenance since 1946. Damaged panes were replaced, the stars were cleaned inside and out, and the lubricants within the rotation system were replaced with modern fluids.

The State Kremlin Palace

By Benjamin Bradley Mulick

Finished in 1961 after three years of work, the Palace of Congresses, later renamed as the State Kremlin Palace (not to be confused with the Grand Kremlin Palace), opened its doors for the first time for the 22nd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, welcoming thousands of party delegates as well as communist leaders from around the world. Today, it is still the Kremlin’s newest building and a multipurpose facility, housing large conventions, cultural displays from around the world and even its own ballet troupe. With these functions giving it continued purpose, the Kremlin’s most modern and out of place building is also one of its most significant.

The Kremlin State Palace stands out from the gilded, pastel buildings around it with its hulking angular lines, and large windows divided by tall marble columns. It’s crowned by a glass banquet hall, which was the brainchild of Khrushchev himself.

It features three main halls: The Great Hall, the Small Hall, and the Diplomatic Hall. The Great Hall is the largest, featuring the palace’s main stage and hosting its most important events. With a seating capacity of six thousand, it is where party congresses were held, and where some of Russia’s most prominent cultural programs take place today. The Small Hall hosts smaller musical performances, and by virtue of having removable seating, also hosts dance events, such as the World Cup of Latin American Dance, as held in June of 2021. The Diplomatic Hall provides a smaller and more intimate setting in which to enjoy performances. Last but not least, the Diplomatic Hall often hosts lesser-known artists, often performing genres that do best in closer settings, such as jazz and folk.

The facility also holds many smaller meeting rooms, intended as breakout rooms for conventions, but also used for various purposes today.

The construction of the State Kremlin Palace came with considerable controversy. Not only is it stylistically wildly inconsistent with the rest of the Kremlin’s buildings, one of Russia’s most oldest and most important historical ensembles, but it also resulted in the destruction of several older buildings to make ways for the Palace’s massive presence.

The demolished buildings included the Old Kremlin Armory Building, originally built in 1851 to house the Kremlin’s ceremonial guard and a collection of state documents and treasure. The northern wing of the Patriarchal Chambers was torn down, formerly part of the private quarters of the head of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Because these were officially designated historic buildings, the legality of razing them was questionable and likely would not have taken place had not the decision been made from the office of Khrushchev himself.

Perhaps the real loss, however, came from underground. The original plans for the palace, before the Second World War, envisioned it as truly massive facility built where Christ the Savior Cathedral now stands. In the Khrushchev era, it was planned to build a smaller but still very large building near MGU, along the river, in what were then the still-developing outskirts of the city. When Khrushchev decided to place it inside the Kremlin, its footprint was again shrunk and it faced restrictions on its height so that the view of the Dormition Cathedral would not be entirely lost.

To make up for this, the bottom part of the building was sunk sixteen meters into the valuable archeological depths of the Kremlin’s soil. The buildings torn down to make room for the Palace were themselves built over much older foundations.

Archeologists were given a short window to explore the former Palace of Natalya Narishkina, the mother of Tsar Peter I, as well the former sites of churches, royal kitchens, workshops, and studios in what was once an economic center based within the historic Kremlin.

Teams of archaeologists were assigned to the area, who, in addition to expected finds, also found a number of secret tunnels. Unfortunately, while the archaeologists did their best to learn and preserve what they could, the limited timeframe allowed by the construction of the State Kremlin Palace meant that the archaeological potential of the site was, in large part, wasted. The tunnels were filled in, the old foundations built over, and the ruins lost to history.

Today, the Palace is perhaps best known as the home of The Kremlin Ballet, which was specifically formed in 1990 under esteemed Russian artist and choreographer Andrey Petrov with the purpose of performing there after the Bolshoi Ballet stopped performing at the palace and returned to the Bolshoi, then under renovations.

While the Kremlin Ballet was created with a strong basis in the classics, they have made more recent contributions to the ballet world with a number of their own classically-inspired modern works, including a ballet adaptation of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer .

The State Kremlin Palace also hosts the Moscow Classical Ballet, which has been dancing in Moscow since 1966. Demonstrations of this tradition in the upcoming year will include the Moscow Classical Ballet’s dancing reinvention of Romeo and Juliet (which was considered scandalous when it was first performed in 1972), and a performance of Swan Lake , one of Russia’s most important contributions to dance, as performed by the Kremlin Ballet.

Built to hold important political events, the State Kremlin Palace is more a cultural building than a political one. The stage’s relatively short history promises to be subsumed by its promising future. Whatever the next big musical or cultural phenomenon in Russia is, the State Kremlin Palace will be a part of it.

• Read a review of The Snow Maidan as performed at the State Kremlin Palace on this site.

A Tour of the Moscow Kremlin Today

Tour as reviewed by Helen McHenry, 2019

As part of our SRAS cultural program, we were given the opportunity to take a tour of the Kremlin, a historic complex and symbol of the Russian government. We met our guide outside of Red Square before walking along the Kremlin walls to the visitors’ entrance. She pointed out the swallowtail merlons bordering the wall, a design popular in 15th century Italian-style architecture, before we mounted the battlement. To travel behind the Kremlin walls, we crossed a bridge that used to span the Neglinnaya River but today acts as an archway covering part of the footpath.

Inside the Kremlin is an intriguing mix of old and new – from the 15th century walls to the 20th century block of modernism known as the State Kremlin Palace. Our guide informed us of the controversy over the palace’s design, which stands in such contrast to the more traditional styles surrounding it. The building, built under Khrushchev’s leadership primarily as a government meeting hall, has almost as many floors underground as it does above ground. Although many cried out against the building when it was built, it still stands today, where it is now used mainly to host concerts.

A brief walk along a path lined with cannons from the state artillery collection brought us to what appeared to be the mother of all cannons. Indeed, the Tsar Cannon is the largest bombard by caliber ever manufactured and has never been used due to its vast size. Just around the corner lay a similarly large but unused item – the Tsar Bell. Commissioned during the time of Empress Anna, niece of Peter the Great, an almost life-size image of her adorns the bell’s surface.

We then traveled to Cathedral Square, which, as its name suggests, features a number of beautiful cathedrals. The overcast day did nothing to accentuate the gold domes that capped their many towers, but no amount of gloom could dim their impressive stature – so immense that photographing them from my vantage point proved a challenge. Each cathedral was adorned with more stunning iconography than the last, overwhelming to the point of monotony as we shuffled through the throngs of tourists.

Our next visit was to the State Armoury, a neoclassical building resplendent with the wealth of the tsars. We traipsed through room after room of riches, from icons, dishware, and diplomatic gifts to clothing, carriages, and thrones. What stood out to me the most was the two distinct – and sometimes warring – natures of Russian identity on display at the Armoury, East and West. The contrast was particularly obvious amongst the collections of clothing, weaponry, and thrones. The older pieces hearkened back to the time before the Western pivot of Peter the Great. While these remained just as ornately decorated as their modern counterparts, they were, on the whole, a lot less outlandish than those done in the styles of the West.

The Armoury marked our last stop within the Kremlin, so we traveled across the city center to the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. Although the cathedral is the world’s largest Orthodox church, the current building is not the original. Christ the Saviour was demolished under the reign of Stalin and was only rebuilt in the late 1990s. Since then, the cathedral has gained fame as the site of Pussy Riot’s 2012 performance, which landed three members in jail for “hooliganism.”

Our guide let us explore the church on our own, as the church requires groups to be led by its own guides. Looking forward to lunch, we opted for a quick pass through the cathedral. Had I not been so hungry, I could have spent hours inside, as every surface held intricately-painted religious imagery intermixed with adornments heavily gilded with gold. Photographs were not allowed within the cathedral, reserving this spectacle to be seen first-hand.

The Kremlin in its entirety is a spot I recommend to all visiting Moscow, as four hours within its walls was not enough for our group to even scratch the surface of the wonders within.

Tour as Reviewed by Joseph Ozment, 2016

As part of SRAS’s Russian as a Second Language (RSL) program at Moscow State University, I had the opportunity to attend a guided walking tour of the Kremlin and its museums. We had a professional tour guide provided by SRAS who was very well informed about all aspects of the Kremlin’s sites and always willing to answer questions.

The tour, as offered by SRAS each session, can differ slightly based on availability and timing. We began our day’s tour not at the Kremlin, but at the nearby Cathedral of Christ the Savior, Russia’s largest Orthodox cathedral and one of the largest Christian structures in the world. Note that there are wardrobe requirements for entering the church (men and women both must have their shoulders covered, while men cannot wear shorts and women must wear skirts at least beneath the knee).

Before going inside, we were taken around the massive structure, and given a brief yet informative overview of its history. We learned that, despite the classical style of the building, it is actually only about 20 years old, having been constructed to resemble the church that once stood on the same ground.

During Communist times, the ground on which the Church now stands was a massive swimming pool, having been filled with water after the original Church was destroyed. The plans that the Communists originally had for the site were to construct the headquarters of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which would be one of the tallest structures in the world and house the office of the Soviet Union’s premier inside the head of a giant Vladimir Lenin statue adorning the top.

The Cathedral is a truly stunning structure. Comparable only to St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome in my mind, the sheer amount of open air is amazing when one considers how still and tranquil it is on the inside.

We then continued onwards to the Kremlin itself, which was teeming with guided tours from all over the world, just like ours. Seeing other groups from America, but also some from France, Italy, China, and several other European and Asian countries was very interesting, as people tend not to think of Russia as a popular tourist destination. However, tourism here has grown rapidly in recent years, particularly since the ruble lost about half its value on world markets, making Russia a much more affordable location.

Anna informed us of the purposes of all of the first structures we encountered within the Kremlin walls. First of all, though, she made sure that we were aware that the word “Kremlin” does not refer just the center of government in Moscow, but is a general word that means fortress. Most Russian cities and towns of reasonable size and with a medieval history possess a Kremlin.

We saw one of the offices in which President Putin occasionally works, as well as the large, semi-controversial event and concert hall that resides just inside the main entrance to the Kremlin. Despite its modern style that clashes somewhat with the comparatively ancient structures around it, the fact that the building is covered in glass at least ensures that it reflects the beauty and history that abounds within the Kremlin.

After seeing the aptly named Tsar Cannon and Tsar Bell, both of which are two of the largest objects of their kind in the world, and neither of which have been used for their structural purpose in their existence, we moved on to see several of the many churches that stand within the walls of the Kremlin.

Inside the Church of the Annunciation, we were informed of some of the basic components of any Russian Orthodox Church. For starters, every inch of wall is covered in some image or another, from icons of Saints to giant murals that depict judgment day and the people of earth being sent either to heaven or hell. We also learned that the altar in an Orthodox church is given its own room, to which only the priests are allowed entry. The mysticism that is native to Orthodoxy and inherent to its liturgy was embodied in all aspects of these churches.

After our tour of the Kremlin’s outside squares, we were taken on a tour of the Armory Museum, which houses outfits, household items, carriages, armor, weapons, and various sundry items that belonged to the Tsars and Tsarinas of Russia. Anna knowledgeably led us through the various styles worn by different Russian rulers, and explained the significance(s) behind the appearance of what they wore and the carriages in which they rode.

We were in awe of the beautiful jewels that encrusted everything the royals wore and every vessel out of which they drank or off of which they ate, not to mention of the thrones on which they sat. We saw gifts from foreign dignitaries and rulers, and even the museum’s collection of Faberge creations.

All in all, it was a day rich with history and made even more enjoyable by our friendly and incredibly knowledgeable tour guide, Anna. There is hardly a more essential Russian experience to have during your time in Moscow than a guided tour of the Kremlin.

Incidentally, Anna, a guide that SRAS has worked with for years, helps run a guiding collective in Moscow called Bridge to Moscow . They run many private tours and are available for custom tours and travel as well.

Latest Updates

By Josh Wilson

In addition to the changes to how the Kremlin stars are lit and renovations to the Kremlin bells in Spasskaya Tower , for instance, several recent events are of interest.

In the mid-2000s, the Russian Orthodox Church lobbied for the restoration of the Chudov Monetary and the Ascension Convent within the Kremlin walls. The idea was seriously considered and even discussed on television by President Vladimir Putin, although only in the sense of rebuilding them as cultural monuments and part of the museum complex, rather than as working religious institutions. In the end, however, the Kremlin Presidium was simply torn down in 2016 and the area left mostly open with fragments of the old foundations left under glass for viewing. The result is a Kremlin even more dominated by open space and gardens.

Wind has damaged the Kremlin walls on a few occasions. In June 1998, several of the iconic sparrow tail structures on the wall were damaged by strong winds. In April 2018, strong wind damaged the Senate Palace roof. In October 2021, scaffolding being used to restore a section of the inner wall was blown over the top of the wall, also damaging several of the iconic sparrow tail structures. In all cases, the damage was quickly repaired.

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About the authors

Serena Keenan

At the time she wrote for this site, Serena Keenan was a rising junior at Smith College in Northampton, MA. She was majoring in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies with a minor in Government and a concentration in Translation Studies. She hoped to study abroad in Moscow during the spring 2022 semester. After college, she hoped to go on to work in nuclear nonproliferation. In her free time, she likes to read and crochet.

Program attended: Online Interships

View all posts by: Serena Keenan

Caroline Barrow

Caroline Barrow is a graduate of Texas A&M University with a degree in International Studies and Russian. She loves traveling and hearing people’s stories. Out of the places she’s been able to visit, her favorite was Kiev, Ukraine for its beauty, history, and friendly people. She received a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship and, at the time she wrote for this site, was spending year teaching English in Kostanay, Kazakhstan. Additionally, she was been named SRAS’s Home and Abroad Translation Scholar for the 2013-2014 cycle. Her contributions included mostly translations of articles and blog posts that will be of interest to students.

Program attended: Home and Abroad Scholar

View all posts by: Caroline Barrow

Lee Sullivan

Lee Sullivan is an undergraduate student at Stetson University. She is currently pursuing a BS in cybersecurity and a BA in Russian, East European, and Eurasian studies. Next semester Lee will be in Vladivostok, Russia – studying the Russian language and participating in the Home and Abroad internship with SRAS. She aspires to pursue a master’s degree upon graduating.

View all posts by: Lee Sullivan

Benjamin Mulick

Ben Mulick, at the time he wrote for this site, was a fourth year Global Studies major at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.

View all posts by: Benjamin Mulick

Jack Fischer

Jack Fischer, at the time he wrote for this site, was majoring in Physics with Russian and Economics minors at Iowa State University of Science and Technology in Ames, Iowa. He is studied Russian as a Second Language with SRAS over the summer of 2016 to improve his command of the Russian language. In the future, he’d like to work for himself and run a business, preferably abroad.

Program attended: Challenge Grants

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Joseph Ozment

Joseph Ozment is a fourth-year International Studies and Russian Studies major at Rhodes College in Memphis, TN. He is minoring in music minor and has spent a lot of free time on music projects. He is studying Russian as a Second Language and also working an internship with The Moscow Times. He hopes to increase his Russian skills and cultural awareness so as to use his knowledge of the country and language in a professional setting in the future.

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Helen McHenry

Helen McHenry, at the time she wrote for this site, was a double major in international relations and Russian at the Ohio State University, with minors in Spanish and public policy. She studied with Russian as a Second Language with SRAS at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow in order to advance her proficiency in Russian and appreciation for Russian culture. She hoped to use the knowledge gained during her time abroad to advocate for foreign policy that strengthens relations between East and West in her future career.

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Julia Brock

Julie Brock, at the time she wrote for this site, had returned to University of Kentucky to pursue a Global Studies Certificate, with an emphasis on Russia and the travel industry. She earned prior BA and MA degrees in psychology. A few years ago, she traveled to Russia, Estonia, and Finland, and loves the culture and history of these areas. She works at the campus library, and enjoys reading, running 5Ks, and spending time with her dogs. She lived for five years in Minnesota and loved the snow, winter sports, and Museum of Russian Art.

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Hudson Dobbs

Hudson received his BA in Russian Studies with a minor in Corporate Communications from Baylor University. At the time he wrote for this site, he was serving as a Home and Abroad Scholar as part of a Spring, 2022 session of SRAS’s Language and Society program St. Petersburg. While abroad, Hudson will be researching the Russian coffee culture, as well as the evolution of specialty coffee in Russia. His goal is to open his own coffee shop in the US - taking his experiences abroad and applying them to his future business.

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Guest Essay

The Supreme Court Got It Wrong: Abortion Is Not Settled Law

By Melissa Murray and Kate Shaw

Ms. Murray is a law professor at New York University. Ms. Shaw is a contributing Opinion writer.

In his majority opinion in the case overturning Roe v. Wade, Justice Samuel Alito insisted that the high court was finally settling the vexed abortion debate by returning the “authority to regulate abortion” to the “people and their elected representatives.”

Despite these assurances, less than two years after Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, abortion is back at the Supreme Court. In the next month, the justices will hear arguments in two high-stakes cases that may shape the future of access to medication abortion and to lifesaving care for pregnancy emergencies. These cases make clear that Dobbs did not settle the question of abortion in America — instead, it generated a new slate of questions. One of those questions involves the interaction of existing legal rules with the concept of fetal personhood — the view, held by many in the anti-abortion movement, that a fetus is a person entitled to the same rights and protections as any other person.

The first case , scheduled for argument on Tuesday, F.D.A. v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, is a challenge to the Food and Drug Administration’s protocols for approving and regulating mifepristone, one of the two drugs used for medication abortions. An anti-abortion physicians’ group argues that the F.D.A. acted unlawfully when it relaxed existing restrictions on the use and distribution of mifepristone in 2016 and 2021. In 2016, the agency implemented changes that allowed the use of mifepristone up to 10 weeks of pregnancy, rather than seven; reduced the number of required in-person visits for dispensing the drug from three to one; and allowed the drug to be prescribed by individuals like nurse practitioners. In 2021, it eliminated the in-person visit requirement, clearing the way for the drug to be dispensed by mail. The physicians’ group has urged the court to throw out those regulations and reinstate the previous, more restrictive regulations surrounding the drug — a ruling that could affect access to the drug in every state, regardless of the state’s abortion politics.

The second case, scheduled for argument on April 24, involves the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (known by doctors and health policymakers as EMTALA ), which requires federally funded hospitals to provide patients, including pregnant patients, with stabilizing care or transfer to a hospital that can provide such care. At issue is the law’s interaction with state laws that severely restrict abortion, like an Idaho law that bans abortion except in cases of rape or incest and circumstances where abortion is “necessary to prevent the death of the pregnant woman.”

Although the Idaho law limits the provision of abortion care to circumstances where death is imminent, the federal government argues that under EMTALA and basic principles of federal supremacy, pregnant patients experiencing emergencies at federally funded hospitals in Idaho are entitled to abortion care, even if they are not in danger of imminent death.

These cases may be framed in the technical jargon of administrative law and federal pre-emption doctrine, but both cases involve incredibly high-stakes issues for the lives and health of pregnant persons — and offer the court an opportunity to shape the landscape of abortion access in the post-Roe era.

These two cases may also give the court a chance to seed new ground for fetal personhood. Woven throughout both cases are arguments that gesture toward the view that a fetus is a person.

If that is the case, the legal rules that would typically hold sway in these cases might not apply. If these questions must account for the rights and entitlements of the fetus, the entire calculus is upended.

In this new scenario, the issue is not simply whether EMTALA’s protections for pregnant patients pre-empt Idaho’s abortion ban, but rather which set of interests — the patient’s or the fetus’s — should be prioritized in the contest between state and federal law. Likewise, the analysis of F.D.A. regulatory protocols is entirely different if one of the arguments is that the drug to be regulated may be used to end a life.

Neither case presents the justices with a clear opportunity to endorse the notion of fetal personhood — but such claims are lurking beneath the surface. The Idaho abortion ban is called the Defense of Life Act, and in its first bill introduced in 2024, the Idaho Legislature proposed replacing the term “fetus” with “preborn child” in existing Idaho law. In its briefs before the court, Idaho continues to beat the drum of fetal personhood, insisting that EMTALA protects the unborn — rather than pregnant women who need abortions during health emergencies.

According to the state, nothing in EMTALA imposes an obligation to provide stabilizing abortion care for pregnant women. Rather, the law “actually requires stabilizing treatment for the unborn children of pregnant women.” In the mifepristone case, advocates referred to fetuses as “unborn children,” while the district judge in Texas who invalidated F.D.A. approval of the drug described it as one that “starves the unborn human until death.”

Fetal personhood language is in ascent throughout the country. In a recent decision , the Alabama Supreme Court allowed a wrongful-death suit for the destruction of frozen embryos intended for in vitro fertilization, or I.V.F. — embryos that the court characterized as “extrauterine children.”

Less discussed but as worrisome is a recent oral argument at the Florida Supreme Court concerning a proposed ballot initiative intended to enshrine a right to reproductive freedom in the state’s Constitution. In considering the proposed initiative, the chief justice of the state Supreme Court repeatedly peppered Nathan Forrester, the senior deputy solicitor general who was representing the state, with questions about whether the state recognized the fetus as a person under the Florida Constitution. The point was plain: If the fetus was a person, then the proposed ballot initiative, and its protections for reproductive rights, would change the fetus’s rights under the law, raising constitutional questions.

As these cases make clear, the drive toward fetal personhood goes beyond simply recasting abortion as homicide. If the fetus is a person, any act that involves reproduction may implicate fetal rights. Fetal personhood thus has strong potential to raise questions about access to abortion, contraception and various forms of assisted reproductive technology, including I.V.F.

In response to the shifting landscape of reproductive rights, President Biden has pledged to “restore Roe v. Wade as the law of the land.” Roe and its successor, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, were far from perfect; they afforded states significant leeway to impose onerous restrictions on abortion, making meaningful access an empty promise for many women and families of limited means. But the two decisions reflected a constitutional vision that, at least in theory, protected the liberty to make certain intimate choices — including choices surrounding if, when and how to become a parent.

Under the logic of Roe and Casey, the enforceability of EMTALA, the F.D.A.’s power to regulate mifepristone and access to I.V.F. weren’t in question. But in the post-Dobbs landscape, all bets are off. We no longer live in a world in which a shared conception of constitutional liberty makes a ban on I.V.F. or certain forms of contraception beyond the pale.

Melissa Murray, a law professor at New York University and a host of the Supreme Court podcast “ Strict Scrutiny ,” is a co-author of “ The Trump Indictments : The Historic Charging Documents With Commentary.”

Kate Shaw is a contributing Opinion writer, a professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School and a host of the Supreme Court podcast “Strict Scrutiny.” She served as a law clerk to Justice John Paul Stevens and Judge Richard Posner.

Bernie Sanders’s foreign policy ‘revolution’ is a string of leftist clichés

The vermont senator looks at america’s global record and sees mostly failure and disgrace..

This week Foreign Affairs published a 2,800-word essay by Bernie Sanders, the US senator from Vermont whose campaigns for president in 2016 and 2020, though unsuccessful, attracted wide interest and support. Sanders calls himself a democratic socialist and his essay, titled “A Revolution in American Foreign Policy,” faithfully reflects the far-left worldview he has always embraced.

That worldview is easily summarized: Most of what is bad in world affairs can be blamed on the United States, and especially on American corporations and billionaires. Sanders sees US foreign policy as fundamentally “disastrous,” a word he uses repeatedly in his essay. “For many decades, there has been a ‘bipartisan consensus’ on foreign affairs,” Sanders writes in his opening paragraph. “Tragically, that consensus has almost always been wrong.”

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The great 19th-century French statesman Talleyrand reportedly said about the Bourbon royal dynasty that they learned nothing and forgot nothing . The same can be said of the 82-year-old Sanders. He regards America’s global record since World War II as an almost unrelieved litany of failure. “It’s easy to see that the rhetoric and decisions of leaders in both major parties are frequently guided not by respect for democracy or human rights but militarism, groupthink, and the greed and power of corporate interests,” he declares.

From Sanders’s perspective, America went wrong with the Cold War. What President John F. Kennedy described as “a long twilight struggle” to defend liberty from a Soviet empire bent on global repression, the Vermont senator sees as America’s “shameful track record” of propping up anticommunist dictators, fighting unwinnable wars, and backing military coups in countries like Iran and Guatemala. In Southeast Asia, “the United States lost a war that never should have been fought,” he fumes, making no connection between the eventual departure of US forces and the horrors imposed by the Communist regimes that subsequently took control. In Eastern Europe, America’s victory in the Cold War opened the door to freedom, democracy, prosperity, and grateful alliance with the West. To that victory, the greatest US foreign policy success in the second half of the 20th century, Sanders doesn’t even allude.

He likewise pours out his scorn on the US policies that followed the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Reasonable people certainly found much to debate about the global war on terror and the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. It would be interesting to know how Sanders thinks the United States should have responded to the murderous threat posed by radical jihadists of Al Qaeda and the Taliban. But he doesn’t say. Should Saddam Hussein, one of the world’s cruelest dictators, have been left in power? He doesn’t say. What does Sanders recommend regarding Iran, which is ruled by a regime implacable in its pursuit of nuclear weapons, its sponsorship of regional terror networks, and its hatred of the United States? He doesn’t say.

Throughout his essay, Sanders is voluble on the subject of what American foreign policy makers have gotten wrong, yet almost wholly silent when it comes to explaining how they could have gotten it right.

He is no more illuminating on today’s international crises. He devotes a single boilerplate sentence to Russia’s savage war against Ukraine: “Like a majority of Americans, I believe it is in the vital interest of the United States and the international community to fight off Russian President Vladimir Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine.” But after that throat-clearing, he focuses on the real villain — the “many defense contractors” that see the war in Ukraine “primarily as a way to line their own pockets.” Sanders rails at length about how much Raytheon charges for its Stinger missiles and the “record-breaking profits” earned by weapons manufacturers. Those profits clearly infuriate him far more than Putin’s slaughter.

He offers a similar bait-and-switch on China. “The United States can and should hold China accountable for its human rights violations,” Sanders writes. What follows, however, is not Sanders’s plan for promoting liberty in China but an extended denunciation of human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia. There is no question that the record of the Saudi regime is appalling. But Sanders’s lopsided outrage reflects a theme that runs throughout his essay: The governments he denounces most heatedly are those that ally themselves with the United States.

When all is said and done, the foreign policy “revolution” Sanders advocates is merely a tired recapitulation of leftist naysaying and eat-the-rich socialist clichés. He calls for unspecified “long-term efforts to build a world order based on international law,” for “ensur[ing] that all countries are held to the same standards on human rights,” and for “trade agreements that benefit workers ... not just multinational corporations.” Fine words, devoid of substance.

Over the years, Foreign Affairs has published articles of paradigm-shifting importance — George Kennan’s “ X Article ” in 1947, for example, or Samuel Huntington’s influential “ The Clash of Civilizations .” What Sanders has written will shift nothing. It is mere preaching to the choir, convincing only to those who already believe.

Jeff Jacoby can be reached at [email protected] . Follow him @jeff_jacoby . To subscribe to Arguable, his weekly newsletter, visit globe.com/arguable .

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The gaming industry’s edge in the artificial intelligence revolution.

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AI creates a more immersive and interactive experience for players.

Since its foundation, the gaming industry has been a leader in technological innovation, pushing forward and embracing or creating new technologies.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been part of gaming since the early days of arcade games. It has evolved from simple decision-making processes in games like Galaga to complex systems that power today’s large and immersive gaming worlds. The way we use AI today in game development gives us a peek into the future of this emerging technology.

How Today’s Games Use AI

Today, AI is not just an add-on but a key part of game development. It creates a more immersive and interactive experience for players. Developers use this technology to breathe life into non-playable characters (NPCs), making them seem real and encouraging interaction within the game.

Ubisoft, for example, uses AI to generate real-time text responses between players and NPCs. Yet, this only represents a small fraction of what AI can do with NPCs. With the way that AI is developing today, there may soon come a day when AI programs are playing the game just like their human companions.

But AI does more than improve dialogue. It can quickly create large digital environments, handle complex data, and simulate realistic environmental effects. This significantly changes the gaming experience.

These expansive digital realms rely on AI to manage vast amounts of data, coordinate interactions between players, and simulate ecosystems teeming with NPCs. This enables video games to provide a sense of realism and depth that would be very difficult without AI’s computational power and data management capabilities.

What AI Games Learn From Customers

AI’s potential goes beyond gaming. Similar to how Amazon and Netflix use customer data to make recommendations, gaming AI uses player behavior to inform game development and marketing strategies. This, in turn, opens new opportunities for growth. Additionally, AI can use this data to provide business leaders with a map of their organization’s issues and opportunities while guiding them to sustainable solutions that push their business forward.

A recent study from IDC reports returns of $3.50 on every $1 invested into new AI technology. These kinds of advances illustrate the gaming industry’s penchant for adopting the latest technology to see how it can improve their player’s experience. Indeed, by examining the new technology adopted by the gaming industry, business leaders from across different industries open a window into the future.

We can observe how people play with these new technologies in their games to see what’s on the horizon.

Toward an AI-Native Future

Businesses that proactively adopt industry-changing innovations gain a significant edge over their competitors. Twenty years ago, the digital transformation ushered in major changes across global industries. Today, however, the company that invests in AI will reap the benefits of this industry disruption.

The rise of AI-native gaming companies is anticipated to be a major shift. It’s leading to a new era of virtual collaboration worldwide. These companies are recognized for their advanced technology and ability to analyze data. This allows game developers and publishers to optimize the creation and operation of games in ways we couldn’t imagine before.

While many might look to Silicon Valley’s largest tech giants for answers about AI, those tech giants do not hold a monopoly on this emerging machine learning technology. As the gaming industry uses AI more and more, it’s paving the way with innovative structures and creative processes that can be applied to other sectors. The lessons we learn from creating, developing, and operating AI-driven platforms will be useful across industries.

In a world that’s increasingly defined by AI, the gaming industry’s journey with this technology is a great example. It not only improves the gaming experience but also shows how other industries might use AI to improve human capabilities and experiences.

As we move towards a future dominated by AI, the gaming industry’s path acts as a guide and a driving force, pushing forward the joint evolution of society and technology.

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