There was a huge difference between seeing oneself as a courtier, looking for patronage appointments, and seeing oneself as a republican patriot.
There was a huge difference between being subjects, and being citizens.
Really, the whole way people thought about society was fundamentally changed. Since the Americans did not experience a reign of terror, or a Napoleonic dictator, Wood argues that it is easy to underestimate the American Revolution. Wood is arguing against a belief that the American Revolution did not involve a "revolutionary upheaval," and thus, did not involve real change. Not the last word on the Revolution or anything, but certainly a fascinating collection of social and cultural history from America circa 1750 to 1820 or so. Above all, Bancroft Prize–winning historian Wood rescues the revolution from abstraction, allowing readers to see it with a true sense of its drama-and not a little awe.
In The Radicalism of the American Revolution, Wood depicts not just a break with England, but the rejection of an entire way of life: of a society with feudal dependencies, a politics of patronage, and a world view in which people were divided between the nobility and "the Herd." He shows how the theories of the country's founders became realities that sometimes baffled and disappointed them. Wood's Pulitzer Prize–winning book analyzes the social, political, and economic consequences of 1776. Grand in scope, rigorous in its arguments, and elegantly synthesizing thirty years of scholarship, Gordon S.
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