Rethinking America: From Empire to Republic - Hardcover

Rethinking America does not disappoint. Through Murrin's deep and thoughtful analyses, these essays challenge historians to continue rethinking early America in order to better understand their time and our own. (Heather Sommer, Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective)

Rethinking America reminds us of the power wielded by historians and their studies. It and Murrin both offer a compelling explanation for the transformative power of the American Revolution and suggests why it places so prominently in scholarship, political maneuvering, and in the public imagination. Rethinking America deserves significant praise and further critical attention in light of new developments in the field of early American history. At its core, the ten essays collected in Rethinking America explore how British North American colonists turned-citizens of a Republic developed ideas of how to act as British and American citizens. By virtue of its publication, this book asks historians to seriously consider Murrin's place in the pantheon of great historians yet still to test the endurance of his numerous insights. (Society for U.S. Intellectual History)

For five decades John M. Murrin has been the consummate historian's historian. This volume brings together his seminal essays on the American Revolution, the United States Constitution, and the early American Republic. Collectively, these essays rethink fundamental questions regarding American identity, the reasons why colonists felt compelled to declare their independence, and the myriad ways that the American Revolution produced a profoundly transformative change in those who lived through it. They reconsider questions that have shaped the field for several generations and connect those questions to issues of central interest to historians working today. Collectively, the essays gathered here argue that the great historiographical schools that have long competed to explain the American Revolution must move towards a synthesis that allows the whole to be greater than the parts. The essays show how high politics and the study of constitutional and ideological questions―broadly the history of elites―must be considered in close conjunction with issues of economic inequality, class conflict, and racial division.

By bringing together different historiographical schools and a variety of perspectives in both Britain and the North American colonies, Rethinking America explains why what began as constitutional argument that virtually all expected would remain contained within the British Empire exploded into a truly subversive, destructive, and radical revolution that destroyed monarchy and aristocracy and replaced it with a rapidly transforming and wildly pulsing republic. The essays examining the period of the early American Republic discuss why the Founders' assumptions about what their Revolution would produce were profoundly different than the society that emerged from the American Revolution. In many ways, the outcome of the American Revolution put the new United States on a path to a violent and bloody civil war, as is shown by an essay directly comparing the American colonists of 1776 to the Confederate States of America in 1861.

A much anticipated work, this volume offers both groundbreaking and timeless analysis of the nation's critical first decades as it moved from empire to republic.