The Creation of the American Republic 1776-1787 (Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia)

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Gordon S. Wood--winner of the Pulitzer Prize and professor of American history at Brown University--had no idea what he was getting into when he began this 653-page book. Innocently, he wanted to write a "monographic analysis of constitution-making in the Revolutionary era." Little did he know he would discover an intellectual world where a complete transformation of political thought was occurring, one that would create "a distinctly American system of politics." As Wood explains, "Beneath the variety and idiosyncrasies of American opinion there emerged a general pattern of beliefs about the social process--a set of common assumptions about history, society, and politics that connected and made significant seemingly discrete and unrelated ideas. Really for the first time I began to glimpse what late eighteenth-century Americans meant when they talked about living in an enlightened age." This original study of the American political system is a strong contribution to the scholarly studies of the events surrounding the nation's independence.


Gary B. Nash, University of California, Los Angeles
The library shelves groan with books on the American Revolution. Yet this brief account is the first to offer a balanced view of how the Revolution was made by a variety of social groups--ordinary farmers and artisans as well as merchants and lawyers, women as well as men, blacks as well as whites--and how, in turn, these groups were transformed by the Revolutionary experience.


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[A] brilliant and sweeping interpretation of political culture in the Revolutionary generation. -- New England Quarterly


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