It’s easy notion to hold, for us in a multi-racial democracy. Modern readers of Patrick O’Brian get a sense of this intermingling of private and governmental concerns in the way Captain Aubrey and other Post Captains were expected to furnish their own ship-board larders, and how O’Brian’s hero even buys much of his own gun powder.
Perhaps Wood’s most important observation is that while “no one was really in charge of this gigantic, enterprising, restless nation” in the early 1800s, there was no disarray. As a result, “the connectedness of colonial society—its capacity to bind one person to another—was exceedingly fragile and vulnerable to change.”And change it did when the Revolution shattered the traditional bonds between people. As self-interest replaced disinterest, it became the new adhesive holding society together. Most significantly by focusing his scope specifically on the social changes of the American Revolution, Wood allows scholars to see the radicalism of the American Revolution. Wood sums up the vision of the Founders thusly,Their vision resulted in, and was due in part to, changes in society that have become so ingrained in the character of America as to be unremarkable to modern Americans.
To work—as a doctor, lawyer, merchant, printer, or whatever—in order to live indicated a low social station. To the contrary, the colonists were, in the main, relatively prosperous and free. Wood admits that there was a price to be paid for the sort of political system that developed, but he still celebrates the “real earthly benefits it brought to the hitherto neglected and despised masses of common laboring people.” And it surely has done so for many years.Alas, those benefits began to shrink as the constitutional design created by the revolutionaries to contain the power of faction started breaking down by the middle of the nineteenth century. The book will be a difficult read for some. The fount of authority in America before the Revolution … Wood does a thorough job of explaining how patriarchal society worked and how social mores were reflected at all levels, from the dominance of the father in families to that of the king in the monarchy. Is that true today?Unfortunately, we are left with terms that don’t really define us anymore. In fact, argues Wood, “the Revolution resembled the breaking of a dam, releasing thousands upon thousands of pent-up pressures,” which the classical political theories of the revolutionary leaders were unable to contain. For smart lazy students with love from Angel Versetti Spark Notes style summary of the essentials for your preparation The American Revolution by Gordon S. Wood However, even if altruistic disinterest was discarded as impractical, the concept of virtue was democratized.
He is careful to calibrate precisely what 'equality' meant at a time when blacks and women were essentially left out of it. American colonists are Englishmen, sharing the assumption that order and stability in society stem from monarchy. Joyfully for those of us who find it hard to get our historical kicks from ferreting on the battlefields, he devotes few pages to the eight years of actual fighting. In 2010, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal.
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