American Revolutions attempts to balance attention to the larger context while covering the major story on that bigger stage in the period 1750-1800: the creation of the United States and the acceleration of its growth. That approach demotes neighboring empires and native peoples to bit players and minor obstacles to inevitable American expansion. Canada, Spanish America, and the West Indies appear prominently in recent histories of colonial America, but they virtually vanish when historians turn to the subsequent revolution and early republic. Most previous books on the revolution, especially popular histories, focus obsessively on the national story of the United States, on the development of its republican institutions at the national level. Norton, 2016) includes the entire North American Continent, breaking with the traditional and almost exclusive focus on the Thirteen Colonies of the Atlantic Seaboard. His recent book on the American Revolution, entitled American Revolutions (W.W. Alan Taylor is Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor of History at the University of Virginia, and this year’s Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at the Rothermere American Institute.
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