T.H. Breen's Reading List

"Edmund Morgan was a great stylist. He knew how to write accessible prose. I love the architecture of this book. He interlaces a chapter about politics, about what’s happening in Parliament and what the King is up to, with chapters about how ordinary Americans’ lives were transformed because of the decisions you read about in the previous chapter. This back and forth between high politics and local response is creative genius. The Stamp Act Crisis is a model for what great historical writing can be. When Morgan rose to prominence in the profession during the 1950s, World War II had just ended. There was a sense that America’s ideology of freedom and liberty propelled us to victory over an alien and evil ideology; many historians projected these feelings against communism. The intellectual environment of the time was oriented around the clash of ideological systems. There was a sense among Cold War historians that the American values of freedom and liberty were not only superior but had also been proved superior in competition with these other systems. That was the world Morgan came from. What I think Morgan meant was that many colonists felt England had been corrupted and that there was a desire for a more virtuous politics. Notions of freedom, liberty and rights became absolutely paramount in the story that historians of Morgan’s generation told. But, let’s be honest, when we talk about American ideas, we have to say: Whose ideas? We’re talking about what white, male Americans thought."

"Revolutions come about because of the people whose names are not recorded in history books. If you don’t have the people on the street behind you, you just have ideas. My research showed that the common denominator between little towns scattered throughout America was consumer habits. British manufacturing absolutely dominated the American market. Every consumer good in a colonial house was British-made. It slowly dawned on Americans that they could weaponize consumption. If you privately tell me that you are revolutionary, I might believe you but be skeptical that you are going to act on your beliefs. But if you stop buying imported cloth and put down your tea, I know you’re committed. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Protests and boycotts grew more successful as Americans communicated through newspapers. Newspapers were the Facebook of revolutionary times; they were the way Americans organized and confirmed that neighboring towns were joining in. People in Georgia reading about the actions of people in Massachusetts learned that strangers were sharing in their protest; that gave the Revolution power over time. The Marketplace Revolution is about how the American people, through consumer good boycotts, began to resist British oppression. It was a total innovation. I was unable to find any earlier sustained efforts to weaponize consumption. When people talk about the political inventiveness of the Americans, they point to the U.S. Constitution and ignore the fact that the Americans were essentially the first to successfully boycott. I’ve heard from historians in Asia and other places that there is, in fact, no precedent. Later, this technique was imported by Gandhi, for instance, to gain a political voice for people who lacked a vote in the direction of their country."

"The book first appeared as the introduction to a proposed four-volume series of what Professor Bailyn thought were key documents in understanding the American political mind. Ideological Origins of the American Revolution argues that ideas were central to the American Revolution. Bailyn described the Americans, on the eve of the Revolution, as believing that a conspiracy had taken over British politics, causing power to fall into the hands of a few corrupt people and that caused revolutionaries resolved to stand up for a purer form of politics. “American independence was a setback for Native American people” Ideological Origins of the American Revolution was the most popular book that focused on the intellectual life of the Revolution; it won many prizes. It probably remains a key text for students, especially graduate students, in universities today. Bailyn and Morgan were the giants of the field in the fifties and sixties and seventies. Before World War Two, perhaps looking at the Russian Revolution, some historians rummaged through the American Revolution looking for evidence that landed interests and class competition lay behind the ideas espoused by the founders. Morgan and Bailyn showed the shortcomings of looking at events through such a narrow lens. Bailyn looked at the evidence and found no sign in the pamphlets from the period of class competition within the white American population, so he returned attention to the importance of ideas in igniting the Revolution."

"Gordon Wood was a student of Professor Bailyn’s at Harvard. He’s a terrific writer. In this book he maps out the movement from a pre-revolutionary society focused on monarchy, hierarchy and privilege to a revolutionary society. He explains how the Americans gradually found themselves championing republicanism. Republicanism can mean a secular government, where there is no king, or republicanism can mean a system in which all people have a say. It’s a masterly book about how Americans moved from a monarchical society to a republican society, that documents each stage of this change clearly and carefully. I want to remind your readers that when most of the Americans in Gordon Wood’s book were talking about equality, they were talking about equality for white men. That’s also what Thomas Jefferson meant when he talked about equality in the Declaration of Independence. There was never any sense that African Americans or Indians would be involved. I have different views, but I think Gordon would say that during the war and in the period leading up to the Constitutional Convention in 1787, leading Americans believed in a republican society in which leaders would be virtuous, not engaged in grubby money-making. He describes the men we call the founding fathers as almost philosophic figures. Nevertheless, he explains, it wasn’t until after the 1790s and into the 19th century that Americans decided that equality really meant something. In the early republic, some Americans decided that everybody should have a voice and that even the little guy on the street should be heard by his government. This led to what he calls the breakdown of classical republican society into the more liberal and open world of the 19th century. So, as Wood has it, we moved from monarchical to republican to liberal. Wood has this tri-part way of looking at politics."

"In The Will of the People , I had several goals. One was illuminating the lives of often overlooked people of the revolutionary period. The Will of the People is complementary to the work of intellectual historians, like Bailyn and Woods. Ordinary men and women in towns and villages across what became the United States were absolutely essential to launching and sustaining the Revolution. The ideas articulated by ordinary people launched the Revolution and the sacrifices ordinary people made sustained the American Revolution, even when things were going very badly on the battlefield. Sons, fathers and husbands laid down their lives for the Revolution. Families sacrificed their consumer comforts and economic welfare for the cause. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . I tell the stories of the people that don’t make it into the accounts of the intellectual historians and who are not the subjects of any biographies. Understanding their lives is just as vital to understanding the Revolution. I was able to read virtually all of the surviving newspapers from the Revolution. I surveyed all the published materials of the era, including sermons, which gave ordinary people religious justifications for protest. After all, the American Revolution was not just an ideological conflict. Revolutionaries had to withstand misery and fear and bloody conflict. The basics of war—misery and fear—get left out of the story. I tried to restore the emotional register of the Revolution so that readers get a fuller sense of what it meant to fight for independence. The initial goal of the Revolution was simply to make Parliament back down. When Parliament wasn’t eager to compromise, the goal became to gain independence. But to sustain the war effort and the vacuum left as British authorities retreated, citizens’ committees of safety and committees of observation were created, some elected, some appointed. These citizens’ committees not only ran the revolution but governed the colonies and got loyalists on board. So, these committees, like the committees of safety during the French Revolution , policed the Revolution at key moments. It’s estimated that as many as 20,000 adult white males suddenly found themselves in positions of authority. They had never been elected before. They might’ve been seen as too poor or too uneducated for government affairs before. Huge numbers of new people became involved in government. During the Revolution, the colonies became a republican country. They had not set out to become a government of the people, but in the course of the war, that’s what occurred. By the end of the American Revolution, in 1783, to a degree that no founding father planned and that no one anticipated, the United States became a nation run by the people."