Tag Archives: Booked for the Revolution

When Revolution Costs Everything

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January and February – Seeds of Rebellion, Part Seven

On a frozen night in December 1776, the Continental Army was dissolving. Enlistments were expiring. Men were walking home barefoot through snow, leaving bloody tracks on Pennsylvania roads. Thomas Paine, huddled by a campfire, scratched out the words that would become immortal: These are the times that try men’s souls. Washington had them read aloud to the troops before crossing the Delaware.

That moment – desperate, improbable, morally electric – sits at the heart of what Robert Middlekauff accomplishes in The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763–1789. The book asks a question we think we know the answer to but actually don’t: Why did these men keep fighting? And more uncomfortably – what were they actually fighting for?

In an era when the word “revolution” gets applied to everything from phone apps to fitness routines, reading Middlekauff is a corrective act. Real revolution, he shows us, is anguish dressed up in the rhetoric of glory.

The Scholar Behind the Story

Robert Middlekauff published The Glorious Cause in 1982 as the first volume in the Oxford History of the United States series – a scholarly enterprise that set out to give Americans a definitive, peer-reviewed account of their own history. Middlekauff spent his career at the University of California, Berkeley, and brought to the project the patient, rigorous sensibility of an intellectual historian who had previously written about Puritan education and the Mather dynasty.

That background matters enormously. Middlekauff is fundamentally interested in how people think – how ideas shape behavior, how belief systems crack under pressure, how ideology becomes action. He is not a military historian cataloguing troop movements, nor is he a social historian recovering forgotten voices from the margins. He is a historian of the colonial mind, and that makes The Glorious Cause a different kind of war book than most readers expect.

He wrote it at a curious cultural moment: the revolutionary bicentennial had just passed, Ronald Reagan had just been elected on a platform drenched in patriotic nostalgia, and the academy was beginning to fragment into competing methodological camps. Middlekauff’s book was, in part, a serious scholar’s attempt to reclaim the Revolution from both the sentimentalists and the cynics.

The Central Argument: Ideology Made Flesh

Middlekauff’s core interpretation is deceptively simple: the American Revolution was ideologically sincere. This was not a tax revolt dressed up in philosophical language. The colonial leaders – and eventually ordinary farmers and tradesmen – genuinely believed that British policy after 1763 represented a coordinated assault on English liberties that they, as Englishmen, were duty-bound to resist.

This puts him in direct conversation with the “republican synthesis” school of historians like Bernard Bailyn, whose Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967) argued that colonists operated within a coherent, if somewhat paranoid, Whig political tradition. Middlekauff accepts and extends this framework, but where Bailyn stops at ideas, Middlekauff follows them into the mud of Valley Forge.

The book traces how that ideology was tested – and how testing it transformed it. By 1776, resistance to Parliamentary taxation had become something larger: a conviction that Providence itself had assigned Americans a role in the drama of human freedom. This was not cynical rhetoric. Middlekauff argues it was felt, with all the force of religious experience, by men who lived in a culture where political and theological categories were still deeply intertwined.

He writes of the soldiers who stayed: “What kept them going was not pay, not bounties, not discipline, but a sense that they were engaged in something larger than themselves – a cause, glorious in their own word for it, that demanded everything they had.” The word “glorious” in the title is their word, not his. He’s holding them accountable to it.

The Voice on the Page

Middlekauff writes with authority and occasional grace. He is not a stylist in the manner of David McCullough, but he has a gift for compression – for capturing the texture of an experience in a sentence or two before moving the argument forward.

On the Continental soldier’s psychology, he is particularly sharp. He describes men who feared disgrace more than death, who were “motivated by shame as much as glory,” carrying into battle the weight of community expectation and the crushing awareness that their neighbors would know if they ran. This is not the heroic framing of popular history. It is something truer and more interesting: men doing brave things for complicated, deeply human reasons.

His account of the political crisis is equally precise. Of the colonial assemblies’ escalating confrontations with Parliament, he observes that each British attempt to reassert authority convinced colonists not of their own rebelliousness but of Britain’s corruption – confirming every fear the Whig tradition had taught them to hold. The machinery of radicalization, Middlekauff shows, ran on genuine grievance processed through a specific ideological lens.

Dialogue with the Series

Those who have followed Booked for the Revolution will recognize both the continuities and the tensions with earlier readings.

Middlekauff shares Bailyn’s respect for the power of ideas, but where Bailyn’s Ideological Origins is a book of pamphlets and arguments, The Glorious Cause is a book of consequences – what happened when those ideas collided with British regulars, smallpox, and supply shortages. It is Bailyn made incarnate.

Alan Taylor’s American Colonies (2001) offers the most striking contrast in scope. Where Middlekauff zooms in on the Revolutionary generation and the specific ideological world it inhabited, Taylor pulls back to the widest possible lens – a hemispheric, multi-century story in which British North America is just one contested zone among many, populated by overlapping and colliding empires, Indigenous nations, and enslaved Africans. Taylor’s colonists are not proto-Americans yearning for liberty; they are settlers in an unstable, violent Atlantic world shaped by forces far larger than any pamphlet debate. Reading the two books back to back is instructive: Middlekauff’s Revolution feels inevitable and coherent; Taylor’s makes it look contingent and strange. Both effects are useful. Taylor reminds us what Middlekauff’s ideological framework cannot see – all those lives and peoples for whom the Whig tradition was simply irrelevant.

T.H. Breen’s American Insurgents, American Patriots (2010) is a more direct interlocutor, and in some ways the more revealing one. Breen agrees with Middlekauff that ordinary Americans were genuinely motivated – but he relocates that motivation from the elite discourse of constitutional rights to the experience of local community enforcement. For Breen, the Revolution was driven from below, by farmers and tradesmen who organized committees of safety, policed Loyalist neighbors, and built a coercive popular movement before the Continental Congress had fully committed to independence. Middlekauff’s soldiers are moved by ideology absorbed from their political leaders. Breen’s insurgents are moved by rage, solidarity, and the intoxicating power of collective action. Both accounts ring true. Together, they suggest that the Revolution was simultaneously a principled argument conducted at the top and a fierce, sometimes violent social movement conducted at the bottom – and that these two things fed each other in ways neither Middlekauff nor Breen fully capture alone.

What We’ve Learned Since 1982

Four decades of scholarship have complicated Middlekauff’s picture considerably. The Revolution he describes is, in the phrase historians now use, “the Revolution from above” – the Revolution of founders and Continental officers and colonial assemblies.

We now understand far more about Loyalism than Middlekauff could draw on in 1982 – the deep communities of colonists who saw rebellion not as liberty but as mob rule, and who paid for that view with exile and dispossession. We understand more about how Indigenous nations navigated the conflict as a genuine geopolitical contest with their own interests at stake. We understand more about enslaved people who fled to British lines because freedom, for them, came wearing a red coat.

None of this invalidates Middlekauff’s achievement. It contextualizes it. The Glorious Cause tells us what the Revolution looked like to the people who gave it its name and carried it to completion. That perspective is historically essential, even when – especially when – it is incomplete.

The book also predates the full flowering of Atlantic history, which situates the American Revolution within a broader hemispheric context of imperial crisis, Caribbean sugar economies, and European great-power rivalry. Middlekauff’s Revolution is largely a North American story. That was the convention of his time; it is a limitation of ours.

Why Read This in 2026?

Because we are living through another moment when the word “revolution” is cheap and the thing itself – costly, ambiguous, morally unresolved – is poorly understood.

The Glorious Cause restores the cost. It shows that the founders were not superhuman visionaries but frightened, improvising men who had talked themselves into a corner and then discovered, to their own amazement, that they believed what they’d said. It shows that ideology is not mere decoration on the surface of interests – it gets inside people and makes them do things that interests alone would never justify.

It also shows the gap between the cause’s stated ideals and its actual beneficiaries – a gap that 250 years of American history has been spent, imperfectly and incompletely, trying to close. In a year when that project feels newly contested, understanding where the gap came from matters.

Read Middlekauff for what he does brilliantly: the intellectual and military architecture of independence, rendered with scholarly honesty and real narrative drive. Read him alongside Taylor and Breen and Bailyn for the fuller picture. Together, they don’t give you mythology or cynicism. They give you something better – history.

Looking Ahead – The Gathering Storm: The next two months cover the most compressed, intense period of the pre-Revolutionary crisis – the twenty-four months when resistance became rebellion and rebellion crystallized into a formal declaration of independence. This is when abstract grievances turned into armed conflict, when loyalties were tested and fractured, when the unthinkable became inevitable. “The Gathering Storm” metaphor captures both the mounting tension and the sense that forces beyond any individual’s control were converging toward a breaking point.

A Note on This Series

This journey through Revolutionary history is as much about the evolution of historical understanding as the Revolution itself. History isn’t static – each generation reinterprets the past through its own concerns, asking different questions and prioritizing different sources. By reading these books in dialogue across 250 years, we’ll witness how scholarship evolves, how narratives get challenged, and how forgotten stories resurface.

This isn’t about declaring one interpretation “right” and another “wrong,” but appreciating the richness that emerges when multiple perspectives illuminate the same transformative moment. These books won’t provide definitive answers – history rarely does – but they equip us to think more clearly about how real people facing genuine uncertainty chose independence, how ideas had consequences, and how the work of creating a more perfect union continues. As we mark this anniversary, we honor the Revolutionary generation by reading deeply, thinking critically, and engaging seriously with both the brilliance and blind spots of what they created.

You can find the entire series listing here.

The Birth of Rebellion: North Carolina’s Revolutionary Spirit in the 1700s

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January and February – Seeds of Rebellion Part Three

From colony-wide to county-wide, the seeds of rebellion had been planted and were beginning to sprout…

The Birth of Rebellion: North Carolina’s Revolutionary Spirit in the 1700s

In the Carolina backcountry of the 1770s, far from the established colonial centers of Boston and Philadelphia, a revolutionary fire was kindling that would challenge the traditional narrative of American independence. Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, became an unlikely crucible for patriot sentiment, where Scots-Irish settlers, Presbyterian ministers, and frontier farmers forged a distinctly Southern brand of resistance to British authority. Understanding how this remote region developed such fierce independence requires examining the unique cultural, religious, and political factors that transformed loyal colonial subjects into America’s earliest self-proclaimed revolutionaries.

The Scots-Irish Legacy: Seeds of Defiance

The foundation of Mecklenburg County’s patriot mindset was laid long before the first shots were fired at Lexington and Concord. The region’s predominant settlers were Scots-Irish Presbyterians who brought with them a bitter legacy of religious persecution and political marginalization. These immigrants had already endured discrimination in both Scotland and Ireland, where their Presbyterian faith marked them as outsiders in Anglican-dominated societies. As historian Alan Taylor notes in American Colonies, the Scots-Irish carried “a fierce independence and distrust of distant authority” that would prove combustible when transplanted to the Carolina frontier.

This cultural inheritance was not merely abstract resentment. The Scots-Irish settlers had concrete experience with oppressive governance, making them particularly sensitive to perceived injustices from the British Crown. When they established communities in the North Carolina backcountry during the mid-1700s, they brought these memories with them, creating a population predisposed to question and resist overreach by distant powers. Their Presbyterian church structure, which emphasized congregational governance rather than hierarchical authority, reinforced democratic ideals and collective decision-making that would later characterize their revolutionary activities.

Religious Grievances and Colonial Betrayal

The transformation from grievance to open resistance accelerated when the British Privy Council in London dealt Mecklenburg’s settlers a stinging betrayal. After supporting Royal Governor William Tryon against the Regulator movement in 1771 – a costly decision that pitted backcountry settlers against each other – the Scots-Irish Presbyterians of Mecklenburg expected recognition and reward for their loyalty. Instead, the British government voided colonial legislation that had granted them crucial rights: the establishment of Queen’s College (which would have provided local higher education) and the legal authority for their ministers to perform marriages.

This duplicity struck at the heart of the community’s identity. Education and religious legitimacy were not peripheral concerns but foundational elements of Scots-Irish Presbyterian culture. The revocation represented more than administrative inconvenience; it was a profound insult that confirmed their suspicions about British indifference to colonial needs and rights. As Scott Syfert documents in The First American Declaration of Independence, this betrayal “further alienated the community from British rule” and provided tangible evidence that loyalty to the Crown would never be reciprocated with genuine respect or representation.

The Princeton Connection: Intellectual Foundations

While cultural predisposition and political grievances created the emotional fuel for rebellion, intellectual justification came from an unexpected source: the College of New Jersey at Princeton. Several key figures in Mecklenburg County’s revolutionary leadership had studied at Princeton, including members of the prominent Alexander family. The college, under Presbyterian leadership, was a hotbed of Enlightenment thinking blended with Reformed theology, producing graduates who could articulate sophisticated arguments for natural rights and limited government.

John McKnitt Alexander, whose plantation “Alexandriana” became a focal point for revolutionary organizing, exemplified this synthesis of frontier practicality and learned discourse. As depicted in LeGette Blythe’s historical novel Alexandriana, the Alexander home served as more than a prosperous plantation; it functioned as an intellectual hub where ideas about liberty, self-governance, and resistance to tyranny were debated alongside practical strategies for colonial defense. The Princeton-educated ministers and landowners of Mecklenburg could justify their rebellion not merely as frontier defiance but as a principled stand grounded in political philosophy and moral conviction.

From Tension to Declaration: The May 1775 Moment

By the spring of 1775, Mecklenburg County had become a powder keg of revolutionary sentiment. When news of the battles at Lexington and Concord reached Charlotte in May, it provided the spark needed to ignite open rebellion. According to historical accounts – though disputed by some scholars – Colonel Thomas Polk summoned militia representatives to the Charlotte courthouse on May 19, 1775. The gathering elected Abraham Alexander as chairman and John McKnitt Alexander as secretary, then drafted what would become known as the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence.

The language of this declaration was uncompromising. The assembled representatives allegedly resolved that they would “dissolve the political bands which have connected us to the Mother Country” and proclaimed themselves “free and independent” from British rule – fourteen months before the Continental Congress would adopt similar language in Philadelphia. Whether this specific document existed in the form tradition claims remains debated among historians. However, the indisputable historical record shows that Mecklenburg County did produce the Mecklenburg Resolves on May 31, 1775, which called for local self-governance and rejected Crown authority in practical terms.

David Fleming’s investigation in Who’s Your Founding Father? argues compellingly that the distinction between these two documents may be less significant than commonly assumed. Both reflected the same revolutionary spirit, and the later destruction of county records in an 1800 fire created ambiguity that historians have exploited. What matters historically is not whether a specific piece of parchment survived, but that Mecklenburg County’s residents genuinely believed they had declared independence first – and that this belief shaped their identity and actions throughout the Revolutionary War.

The Broader Carolina Context

Mecklenburg County’s revolutionary fervor did not emerge in isolation but reflected broader patterns across North Carolina’s backcountry. The colony had long been divided between the coastal elite, who maintained closer ties to British authority and benefited from established trade networks, and the interior settlers, who felt neglected and exploited by both colonial and imperial governance. The Regulator movement of 1768-1771, though ultimately suppressed, demonstrated the depth of backcountry resentment against corrupt officials and unequal taxation.

Taylor’s American Colonies emphasizes how North Carolina’s geography created distinctive political tensions. The lack of good harbors and the challenge of navigating the Outer Banks limited direct trade with Britain, forcing backcountry farmers to market their goods through Virginia or South Carolina. This geographic isolation contributed to a sense of independence but also economic frustration. When revolutionary resistance began focusing on non-importation and self-sufficiency, North Carolina’s backcountry settlers found themselves ideally positioned – both practically and psychologically – to embrace economic separation from Britain.

The Role of Local Leadership

The patriot mindset in Mecklenburg County was not merely spontaneous popular uprising but reflected deliberate cultivation by local leaders. Figures like Thomas Polk, the Alexander family members, and Presbyterian ministers created networks of communication and mutual support that could rapidly mobilize community response to British actions. These leaders hosted meetings, circulated pamphlets and newspapers, and ensured that news from other colonies reached even remote settlements.

Captain James Jack’s legendary ride to Philadelphia, carrying news of Mecklenburg’s declarations to the Continental Congress, exemplifies this organized activism. While often compared to Paul Revere’s more famous midnight ride, Jack’s journey covered more than 500 miles through difficult terrain. The fact that the community could quickly select a messenger and coordinate such a mission demonstrates the level of political sophistication and preparation that existed in this supposedly frontier region. These were not impulsive rebels but organized revolutionaries who understood the importance of coordination and communication.

Legacy and Memory

The question of whether Mecklenburg County truly declared independence first, or whether the story represents wishful thinking and reconstructed memory, has occupied historians for two centuries. Five U.S. presidents – Taft, Wilson, Eisenhower, Ford, and George H.W. Bush – traveled to Charlotte to honor the claim, and North Carolina’s state flag and license plates proudly display “May 20, 1775” as the date of its first declaration of independence. This persistent commemoration reveals something important regardless of strict historical accuracy: the people of Mecklenburg County believed they acted first, and this belief shaped their understanding of their role in American independence.

In The First America Declaration of Independence?, Scott Syfert argues persuasively that the controversy over authenticity has obscured the more significant historical reality: Mecklenburg County residents did take radical steps toward independence remarkably early in the revolutionary process. Whether the exact language of the May 20 declaration is precisely as remembered matters less than the documented fact that this region rejected British authority in concrete, organized ways before most other American communities. The Mecklenburg Resolves of May 31, 1775, which survive in multiple contemporary accounts, established local governance independent of Crown authority and explicitly rejected parliamentary control.

A Distinctly Southern Revolution

The development of the patriot mindset in Mecklenburg County represents a distinctly Southern contribution to American revolutionary thought. Unlike New England, where merchant interests and urban intellectuals often led resistance, or the Chesapeake, where plantation aristocrats debated rights and representation, North Carolina’s backcountry revolution emerged from Scots-Irish settlers, Presbyterian theology, frontier pragmatism, and accumulated grievances against both colonial and imperial authority.

This revolutionary spirit drew from deep wells of cultural memory, religious conviction, intellectual sophistication, and practical necessity. The Scots-Irish brought resistance in their bones, forged through generations of discrimination. Presbyterian theology provided moral justification for questioning unjust authority. Princeton-educated leaders offered philosophical frameworks for understanding natural rights and legitimate government. And the practical experience of frontier life created communities accustomed to self-reliance and collective decision-making.

When these elements converged in May 1775, Mecklenburg County was prepared to do what seemed radical elsewhere: declare independence not tentatively or hypothetically, but as a concrete political reality. Whether historians ultimately validate every detail of the traditional account matters less than recognizing the genuine revolutionary fervor that existed in this remote corner of North Carolina. The patriot mindset did not begin in Philadelphia or Boston alone; it was simultaneously igniting in places like Charlotte, where different histories and distinct grievances produced the same conclusion: that free people must govern themselves or cease to be free.

The story of Mecklenburg County’s revolutionary development challenges us to recognize the multiple origins and diverse sources of American independence. The Revolution was not one movement but many, not one declaration but several, not one founding moment but an extended process of communities across thirteen colonies reaching similar conclusions through different paths. 

In understanding how the patriot mindset developed in North Carolina’s backcountry, we gain a richer, more complete picture of how America became independent – not through singular genius in a single place, but through the converging determination of many communities, each with its own story of resistance, its own declaration of freedom, and its own claim to have helped light freedom’s first flame.

A Note On This Series

This journey through Revolutionary history is as much about the evolution of historical understanding as the Revolution itself. History isn’t static – each generation reinterprets the past through its own concerns, asking different questions and prioritizing different sources. By reading these books in dialogue across 250 years, we’ll witness how scholarship evolves, how narratives get challenged, and how forgotten stories resurface.

This isn’t about declaring one interpretation “right” and another “wrong,” but appreciating the richness that emerges when multiple perspectives illuminate the same transformative moment. These books won’t provide definitive answers – history rarely does – but they equip us to think more clearly about how real people facing genuine uncertainty chose independence, how ideas had consequences, and how the work of creating a more perfect union continues. As we mark this anniversary, we honor the Revolutionary generation by reading deeply, thinking critically, and engaging seriously with both the brilliance and blind spots of what they created.


You can find the entire series listing here.

Reimagining a Continent’s Contested Past

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January and February – Seeds of Rebellion Part One

Until the 1960s, American colonial history focused narrowly on English-speaking men along the Atlantic seaboard, portraying a triumphalist narrative of “American exceptionalism.” This conventional story treated women as passive, Indians as primitive obstacles, and African slaves as unfortunate aberrations in an otherwise uplifting tale of expanding English freedom and prosperity. Spanish, French, Dutch, and Russian colonies were dismissed as hostile, irrelevant backdrops to the English settlements that supposedly spawned the United States. 

This narrative placed “American” history as beginning in 1607 at Jamestown, spreading slowly westward to the Appalachians, and ignoring lands like Alaska and Hawaii until much later. While this simplification contains partial truths – many English colonists did achieve greater land ownership, prosperity, and social mobility than possible in hierarchical, impoverished England – it excludes the complex realities of women, enslaved Africans, Native peoples, and rival empires that shaped the colonial experience. This appealing but incomplete narrative persists in popular culture despite historians’ efforts to present a more comprehensive, diverse account of early America.

In an era when Americans fiercely debate whose stories belong in history textbooks, Alan Taylor’s American Colonies: The Settling of North America offers a sobering reminder: the fight over who controls the narrative is nothing new. For three centuries before the Revolution, indigenous nations, European empires, and African peoples struggled not just for land and resources, but for the power to define what “America” would become. 

In his precise and detailed opening chapter, Taylor provides a great deal of highly speculative information concerning the existing Native populations of the Americas. Long thought of as unchanging, new discoveries through archeology and anthropology have shown that the Native American cultures had a long and complicated history in the centuries before 1492.

Taylor opens his account of Spanish colonization with the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan in 1519, a city of perhaps 200,000 people – larger than any European city save Constantinople – about to be shattered by Spanish invasion. This image of a sophisticated civilization on the brink captures the book’s central insight: American history is a story of multiple advanced societies colliding, not civilization bringing light to wilderness.

The Historian Behind the Synthesis

Alan Taylor, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and specialist in early American history, published this volume in 2001 as part of the Penguin History of the United States series. His perspective matters because he belongs to a generation of historians who fundamentally reconceptualized colonial America. Where earlier scholars focused narrowly on the thirteen English colonies that became the United States, Taylor takes a continental approach, examining Spanish, French, Dutch, Russian, and Swedish colonies alongside English settlements. Trained in social history and influenced by Native American studies, environmental history, and Atlantic World scholarship, Taylor writes from a position that refuses to see American history as exceptional or inevitable. His work reflects decades of scholarly effort to decenter triumphalist narratives and take seriously the perspectives of colonialism’s victims and participants alike.

The Core Argument: Contingency Over Destiny

Taylor’s central interpretation dismantles the notion that North America was destined to become an English-speaking, Protestant nation devoted to liberty. Instead, he argues that colonial outcomes remained genuinely uncertain for centuries, shaped by disease, environmental factors, indigenous resistance, and the particular economic and religious motivations of different colonizers. “The varied peoples of early America had radically different goals, which they pursued with mixed results over three centuries of conflict and negotiation,” Taylor writes, emphasizing that what we call American history represents merely one possible outcome among many that seemed equally plausible at various moments.

The book challenges readers to recognize that indigenous peoples weren’t simply reacting to European arrival but were “making their own history” by forming strategic alliances, adapting to new technologies, and leveraging European rivalries to their advantage. Taylor insists that we cannot understand colonial America without recognizing Native Americans as central actors whose choices profoundly shaped events. Similarly, he argues that African slaves, despite their bondage, “became essential actors in the creation of colonial societies,” maintaining cultural practices and exercising whatever agency circumstances allowed.

The Author’s Voice: Complexity Without Judgment

Taylor’s prose combines scholarly precision with narrative power. Describing the Spanish conquest, he notes that while Cortés commanded only a few hundred men, “he benefited from invisible, unintended, and unanticipated allies: the microbes that carried epidemic diseases.” This formulation captures Taylor’s insistence on multi causal explanations that include biological and environmental factors alongside human agency.

His treatment of English colonization avoids both celebration and condemnation. Of Virginia, he writes: “The English came to Virginia as violent intruders intent on subordinating, displacing, or destroying the Indians who claimed the land.” Yet he also notes that “most colonists were themselves desperate people, escaping poverty and seeking opportunities denied them in England.” This even-handedness characterizes the entire book, as Taylor seeks to understand rather than judge, to complicate rather than simplify.

Perhaps most memorably, Taylor describes the Columbian Exchange as creating “a new world – indeed, new worlds – compounded from the unintended mixing of plants, animals, microbes, and peoples on an unprecedented scale.” This image of unintended consequences and biological transformation running ahead of human intentions recurs throughout the narrative.

Dialogue with the Field

Taylor’s work builds upon and synthesizes several historiographical traditions. He shares with Alfred Crosby’s “Ecological Imperialism” an emphasis on disease and environmental transformation as historical forces. His continental perspective echoes Herbert Bolton’s early twentieth-century call for a “borderlands” approach, though Taylor is far more critical of Spanish colonialism than Bolton.

Where traditional histories like Samuel Eliot Morison’s celebrated Puritan New England as the seedbed of American democracy, Taylor presents the Puritans as religious extremists whose “intolerance exceeded that of the English establishment they had fled.” His interpretation aligns with more recent scholars like Jill Lepore and James Brooks, who have emphasized colonial violence and indigenous perspectives.

Taylor also engages implicitly with the “Chesapeake School” of historians like Edmund Morgan and Kathleen Brown, who revealed how Virginia’s tobacco economy and racial slavery developed together. However, he places these regional stories within a broader hemispheric context, showing how Caribbean sugar colonies pioneered the brutal plantation system that mainland colonies would later adopt.

What We’ve Learned Since 2001

The two decades since publication have deepened rather than overturned Taylor’s interpretations. DNA evidence has confirmed the devastating scale of disease mortality among indigenous peoples, with some studies suggesting population declines of 90 percent or more – even worse than Taylor estimated. Archaeological work has continued revealing the sophistication of pre-Columbian societies, from Cahokia’s urban complexity to Amazonian landscape engineering.

Recent scholarship has further emphasized indigenous agency and survival. Books like Pekka Hämäläinen’s The Comanche Empire and Kathleen DuVal’s The Native Ground have shown powerful Native American polities dominating regions well into the nineteenth century, extending Taylor’s argument about indigenous power. Meanwhile, historians of slavery like Stephanie Smallwood and Vincent Brown have illuminated enslaved Africans’ cultural resilience and resistance in ways that complement Taylor’s brief treatment.

Climate history has also advanced, with research showing how the Little Ice Age affected colonial outcomes and how indigenous land management practices had shaped the “wilderness” Europeans thought they discovered. These developments enrich rather than challenge Taylor’s framework.

Why Read This in 2026?

In our current moment of contentious debates about how to teach American history, Taylor’s book offers invaluable perspective. It demonstrates that taking seriously the histories of indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans doesn’t diminish American history – it makes that history richer, more accurate, and more interesting. The book shows that the colonial past was genuinely multicultural, not through modern celebration but through conquest, coercion, and negotiation.

For readers seeking to understand how racial inequality became embedded in American society, Taylor traces slavery’s development with clarity and moral seriousness. For those curious about why the United States exists as an English-speaking nation when Spanish colonizers arrived first and French settlers often had better relations with Native Americans, Taylor explains the demographic, economic, and military factors that determined outcomes.

Most fundamentally, American Colonies teaches readers to think continentally and hemispherically, to see American history as connected to global processes rather than exceptional and isolated. In an increasingly interconnected world, this perspective seems more relevant than ever. Taylor’s work reminds us that the land we call America has always been contested ground where different peoples pursued competing visions of the future – and that understanding this contested past is essential for navigating our contested present.

A Note on This Series

This journey through Revolutionary history is as much about the evolution of historical understanding as the Revolution itself. History isn’t static – each generation reinterprets the past through its own concerns, asking different questions and prioritizing different sources. By reading these books in dialogue across 250 years, we’ll witness how scholarship evolves, how narratives get challenged, and how forgotten stories resurface.

This isn’t about declaring one interpretation “right” and another “wrong,” but appreciating the richness that emerges when multiple perspectives illuminate the same transformative moment. These books won’t provide definitive answers – history rarely does – but they equip us to think more clearly about how real people facing genuine uncertainty chose independence, how ideas had consequences, and how the work of creating a more perfect union continues. As we mark this anniversary, we honor the Revolutionary generation by reading deeply, thinking critically, and engaging seriously with both the brilliance and blind spots of what they created.

You can find the entire series listing here.