“The pages that follow represent my attempt to tell the story of a highly compressed historical moment that subsequent generations called the American Revolution.” This opening sentence addresses a question I often have about historical moments, especially ones known in special terms like the American Revolution: what was it called at the time? For the would-be Americans, it was often called “The Cause” and for the British it would have been called the “American Rebellion” and this question isn’t something that is discussed all that […]

This past summer I read Joseph Ellis’s American Dialogue, and I was pretty taken by his clarity of thinking, how well and fluidly he knew his material, how widely read he was, and by his ability to both present the information clearly for the reader and to make it interesting. I was also very taken by his refusal to treat his subjects as either hagiography or polemic. I had been suspect because he’s written so much about the constitutional general, and because so much of […]