A Companion to the American Revolution. (Book Reviews).

A Companion to the American Revolution. Edited by Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole. Blackwell Companions to American History. (Malden, Mass., and Oxford, Eng.: Blackwell Publishers, Inc., 2000. Pp. xvi, 778. $125.00, ISBN 0-631-21058-X.)

A brief review cannot do justice to the breadth and diversity of this volume, which contains a total of ninety essays by seventy-nine scholars, most of whom are leading authorities in their fields. All the standard political and military subjects are admirably covered, from the Stamp Act crisis and Tom Paine's Common Sense, to battles, diplomacy, and the making of state and federal constitutions. Other essays address the issues of class, gender, and especially race, while still others consider an array of less predictable themes and topics: demography, civic culture, currency and finance, and the Revolution's impact on education, language, law, medicine, and most every other aspect of American life. The editors clearly attain their objective of presenting the Revolution "as a whole: as an event or series of events in the lives both of the militant actors and of their more passive contemporaries, ... [and] an upheaval with lasting consequences in the wider world" (pp. xiii-xiv).

The book is divided into six sections, followed by a remarkable thirty-six-page chronology that lists the chief political, military, social, economic, and cultural developments in the Anglo-American world between 1688 and 1791--dates that reflect not only the volume's superb coverage of the Revolution's roots and antecedents, but also the editors' choice of the completion of the establishment of a national political order with the adoption of the Bill of Rights as their collection's endpoint. The twelve essays in Part One examine the "Context" of the Revolution, providing an elegantly concise overview of the politics, economy, society, and culture of British colonial America. Parts Two and Three, which constitute the book's chronological core, discuss "Themes and Events" before and after 1776, respectively. The contributions in Part Four survey the effects of the Revolution in the sugar colonies, Canada, and Europe; those in Part Five assess its social and cultural impact in the United States, showing, most notably, how revolutionary republicanism affected Americans' construction of class, race, and gender identities and ideals. Finally, Part Six--simply entitled "Concepts"--is the most creative and potentially the most useful. The fourteen brief essays in this section define and explain pivotal concepts--such as liberty, property, republicanism, citizenship, and sovereignty--in the history and historiography of Revolutionary America. Jan Lewis's "Happiness" and James T. Kloppenberg's "Virtue" are especially strong, but all fourteen offer concise and highly readable analyses of complex issues from which even specialists in the field may expect to profit.

Although most of the essays in this volume consider general trends and themes, some are particularly notable for students of southern history. Don Higginbotham's account of the War for Independence includes an excellent overview of the southern campaign, and Mark V. Kwasny's essay on the militia and guerrilla warfare discusses the nature of the war in the southern backcountry. Three essays by Robert M. Calhoon--two on religion and one on the loyalists--contain good material on the southern states, as does Donald Lutz's state-by-state account of the revolutionary constitutions. Sylvia R. Frey's superb essay on slavery and antislavery puts the entrenchment and expansion of chattel slavery in the southern states in a broader historical context, and James Sidbury's splendid piece on the social construction of race explains why the Revolutionary era was both "a formative era in the development of racial thought among white Americans ... and the period in which Amerindians and African Americans responded by enunciating clear senses of racial difference and unity" (p. 610). Finally, in her thought-provoking assessment of the Revolution's economic consequences, Mary M. Schweitzer suggests that American independence actually encouraged the spread of slavery and southern distinctiveness. Had the southern states remained within the British Empire, she hypothesizes, slavery would have been abolished there in 1833, as it was in the sugar colonies.

This book will be useful to students seeking a broad but detailed introduction to the history of the Revolution, while more accomplished scholars can turn to it to check forgotten facts, obtain concise but sophisticated explanations of key events and concepts, and get a feel for the chief concerns and interests of historians of Revolutionary America in the year 2000. What this volume lacks, however, is historiography; as fine as its essays are, most (with a few notable exceptions) give the reader no indication that its topic has been, and probably will continue to be, the subject of serious scholarly debate. Some readers, especially those who are new to the field, will regret the absence of historiographical analysis as well as the sparseness of the recommendations for further reading at the conclusion of most of the essays. Nevertheless, the intellectual quality and accessibility of the essays in this volume should make it a standard reference work on the American Revolution for many years to come.