General

We Americans tend to take our Revolution for granted. We assume that it was inevitable, in more ways than one: We assume that it had to happen, and that the outcome was more or

Less foreordained. Both those assumptions have been challenged and are still worthy of discussion. We also assume that the event was truly revolutionary, a radical break with the old order and old ideas. That assumption also bears close scrutiny, for the American Revolution was in some ways conservative in that it did preserve much that was old, much that the colonists feared losing.

Yet historians such as Gordon Wood have argued that the American Revolution was as radical as any in history, an event that has had repercussions well into modern times and into corners of the world that few would connect with the events of 1776.14.Our great revolution is in some ways still going on, in some ways still unfinished, but in many ways it continues to be an event that has the power to capture our collective imagination.

The issues surrounding the American Revolution include:

•  How, when, and why did the Revolution really begin?

•  Was the American Revolutionary War inevitable?

•  Were the colonists justified in taking up arms against the Crown?

•  How "glorious" was the cause, the war for independence itself?

•  How revolutionary was the American Revolution?.What things changed and what remained the same?

We have said that the American Revolution is generally dated from 1763, but it can be argued that the Revolution actually began long before that. We said in the section on colonial America that those who left their homelands to migrate to the new world separated themselves in fundamental ways from those who would not or could not make that journey. If we assume that the people who chose to come were different, then we can say that the roots of the American Revolution actually go back to the old countries, and that the people who left were in a sense already in a state of rebellion.

Second, it has been argued in other contexts that the frontier experience of America had a leveling effect on people; that is, in a wilderness environment that always existed, at least on the fringes of colonial America, the skills needed for survival were unrelated to a person's social or cultural background. America needed and bred working people who were strong enough to withstand the rigors of colonial life, and they were not the sort of people who were likely to take kindly to a superior authority attempting to control their lives.

For the first hundred years of the colonization of North America by the English, from 1607 until early in the 18th century, the colonies were for the most part ignored by the Crown, and very little if any British presence was felt on this side of the Atlantic. But starting about 1700, world events more and more connected the colonies with the mother country.