The Radicalism of the American Revolution

In a grand and immensely readable synthesis of historical, political, cultural, and economic analysis, a prize-winning historian describes the events that made the American Revolution. Gordon S. Wood depicts a revolution that was much more than a break from England. Rather it rejected an entire way of life: a society of feudal dependencies, a politics of patronage, and a world view which divided people between the nobility and “the Herd.” The realities emerging from the revolution sometimes baffled and disappointed its founding fathers.