Indians, the Colonial Order, and the Social Significance of the American Revolution

ETWEEN i965 and i985 a burst of creative scholarship transformed understanding of the American Revolution. As that burst began, historians' general sense was that the great issues turned on problems of central government and that the prime result was the national liberation of a more or less unified people. By its end, we realized how different it was to be citizens of a republic rather than subjects of a monarch. We understood that political society and political ideology had altered radically. We appreciated the Revolution's popular and disruptive dimensions and how all sorts of people took part in building the new American order. We grasped how the Revolution transformed gender from an unproblematic distinction of nature (Thomas Paine's phrase in Common Sense [January I776]) into a central element of the American cultural agenda.1 We saw the Revolution breaking the automatic American connection between enslavement and blackness and turning slavery itself from a general given into a morally and politically troubling sectional peculiarity. By i985, we had a vastly sharpened sense of how different the late colonies of King George III were from the early republic of President George Washington.2