by Gordon S. Wood



Editorial Reviews

Gordon S. Wood--winner of the Pulitzer Prize and professor of American
history at Brown University--had no idea what he was getting into when he
began this 653-page book. Innocently, he wanted to write a "monographic
analysis of constitution-making in the Revolutionary era." Little did he
know he would discover an intellectual world where a complete
transformation of political thought was occurring, one that would create
"a distinctly American system of politics." As Wood explains, "Beneath the
variety and idiosyncrasies of American opinion there emerged a general
pattern of beliefs about the social process--a set of common assumptions
about history, society, and politics that connected and made significant
seemingly discrete and unrelated ideas. Really for the first time I began
to glimpse what late eighteenth-century Americans meant when they talked
about living in an enlightened age." This original study of the American
political system is a strong contribution to the scholarly studies of the
events surrounding the nation's independence.

Gary B. Nash, University of California, Los Angeles
The library shelves groan with books on the American Revolution. Yet this
brief account is the first to offer a balanced view of how the Revolution
was made by a variety of social groups--ordinary farmers and artisans as
well as merchants and lawyers, women as well as men, blacks as well as
whites--and how, in turn, these groups were transformed by the
Revolutionary experience.

Product Details

Paperback: 653 pages
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press (April 1, 1998)
ISBN: 0807847232