Five Tips for Studying American Revolution American Revolution—

Five Tips for Studying American Revolution
    All right, class. Thanks for your selection of this course on American Revolution. Before handing out the reading list and giving you the assignment, I want to share with you some good strategies of learning. First, I’m going to introduce to you my top five tips for studying American Revolution.
    The first tip: Avoid the dreaded revolutionary war fact bubble. What I mean by that is you’re going to be sitting here and over the course of the semester you’re going to hear a lot of familiar names and events, Boston Tea Party, George Washington, the greatest hits of the Revolution, the things and heroes you know and love and learned in high school. Ah, the story of the American Revolution, I love it. But there’s a different story of the American Revolution besides all these names, facts, and dates that you probably have arrived here with in your head. (2) The Revolution obviously is a lot more than that, and you need to be aware of the fact and then allow yourself to step back and look at the big picture.
    Tip number two: Think about the meaning of words. (3) Be careful what you assume about words because what seems obvious in meaning to you now probably meant something really different in 1776 or 1783, and I want to look at one example because it’s a really striking one and that’s the word "democracy." Okay. So sitting here in this room, by our standards, democracy is a good thing. Right? To us it’s good, but to people in the founding generation, not so much. They weren’t so sure about it. To them the word "democracy" signaled a kind of government in which every single person participated personally, not a government based on representation. (4) We’re talking mass politics, in the minds of most people in the founding generation just the definition of what chaos was.
    Okay, we have two tips. Now, tip number three: Remember that Founders were people. It sounds really obvious, but what I really mean here is that we tend to forget this pretty simple fact.
    We forget that the Founders were people. (5) We assume that they were these all-knowing demigods who were sort of calmly walking their way through the creation of a new model nation. We put them up on this sort of—ah—founder mountaintop of American history, and it’s—really it’s easy to do. Sometimes just listening to their words or reading their words would inspire you to want to do that. But remember, those Founders were people. They were regular human beings. They were well educated, they were thoughtful, they were sometimes well-meaning, they were sometimes hard-working, maybe sometimes not so much, they were people aiming high, they were people who did feel responsible to posterity, but still they were people.
    The history of this period is a history of decisions of various kinds, and these were hard decisions and they were being made by people who did not know the answers. They’re making it up as they go along. So when we talk about the American Revolution we’re talking about people and this course takes this idea really seriously. Part of what we’re going to be doing over the course of the semester is looking at the Revolution from the vantage point of participants, trying to see how people at the time understood the events unfolding around them. How did the colonists understand themselves as British subjects? How did they feel about the British empire or about the King or about Parliament? How did they come to put Americanness in the foreground? How did rebelling against their own country make sense?
    So it’s tip number three: Founders were people, which brings us to tip number four: (7) We’re not just talking about Founders. The Revolution was not just a quiet conversation between a bunch of guys wearing wigs. We’re talking about a revolution, a popular uprising by vast numbers of colonists fought on American ground by Americans of all kinds, and it meant different things to different kinds of people. (8) We’re talking about a popular revolution grounded on the ideas and actions of people throughout many different levels of society.
    Okay. (9) Finally, tip number five: Remember contingency. Again, an obvious thing but something we don’t think about. People at the time didn’t know what was going to happen. Think for a moment about all of the things that we assume about the Revolution. We assume that the colonists were right and that the British were wrong. We assume that a Revolution was inevitable. We assume that there was broad agreement at any one time about what should be done. Right? Of course we need to declare independence. Of course the colonists are going to win the war. Of course there should be a national union. Those are all the sorts of things that I think we do assume and that’s a lot of assumptions; that’s a lot of "of courses, " but in fact it’s important to remember that people didn’t know what was going to happen.
    You really need to allow for contingency because literally what they assumed was: Anything can happen. (10) I don’t think you get that idea unless you remind yourself about contingency, about the fact that there are no predetermined outcomes and that anything can happen. I think particularly when you’re studying a revolution it’s really important to remember contingency, and we will discover what contingency means in this time period over the course of the semester.
    Okay, today I’ve introduced to you the five tips for studying American Revolution. Next week, we’ll look at the background of the war. See you next Thursday.