Remembering the Revolution
: Memory, History, and Nation Making from Independence to the Civil War
Published by University of Massachusetts Press, 2013: Remembering the Revolution: Memory, History, and Nation Making from Independence to the Civil War, edited by Michael A. McDonnell, Clare Corbould, Frances M. Clarke and W. Fitzhugh Brundage.
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Reviews:
“By emphasizing the changing nature of collective and individual memory, this collection makes a valuable contribution to understanding the different meanings of the American Revolution in US history.”
“A welcome contribution to public and college library American History shelves.”
“Remembering the Revolution is a superb book that illustrates quite well that the American Revolution was not a unifying event and that subsequent generations of Americans have held contested and varied ideas over its meaning. It demonstrates that the debates among our political parties who reference the Founding Fathers and their agendas is nothing new in our nation’s history.”
— Joshua Camper, University of Tennessee Martin, H-Net Reviews, July 2014
“Utilizing sources including emotive poems, diaries, contemporary histories, worship events, and pension applications, the editors and authors created a nuanced volume cogently exploring issues of memory studies and the American Revolution that is highly recommended for scholars in either field.”
“A cutting edge collection which incorporates the latest theoretical and empirical work on nation building, the formation and transmission of memory, the relation of communal memory to various communities, and the role of memory in the making and unmaking of the American nation in the nineteenth century.”
“With persistent misperceptions of the founding era embedded in American memories, this study’s timely contributions merit close attention. Readers curious about the Revolution’s conflicting legacy, the workings of memory, or the challenges of national identity formation will find the book of particular value. Indeed, anyone keen to separate the tangled threads connecting the Revolution to subsequent processes of national memory-making would do well to consult this fine collection.”
— Ken Miller, Washington College, The Public Historian, vol. 37, no. 3 (2015): 137-139
“This book is a significant contribution to our understanding of how Americans in the early republic molded the memory of the nation's founding event. Edited by an international team of scholars with a combined expertise in the Revolution and in memory studies, the contributors apply an impressive array of approaches to early republic cultural productions.”
About the Book:
With contributions from: Peter Bastian (Australian Catholic University), Keith Beutler (Missouri Baptist University), Daryl Black (Chattanooga History Center), Seth C. Bruggeman (Temple University), W. Fitzhugh Brundage (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), Eileen Ka-May Cheng (Sarah Lawrence College), Frances M. Clarke (University of Sydney), Clare Corbould (Monash University), Caroline Cox (University of the Pacific), Tara Deshpande (University of Leeds), Carolyn Eastman (Virginia Commonwealth University), William Huntting Howell (Boston University), Evert Jan van Leeuwen (Leiden University), Emily Lewis Butterfield (Arizona State University), Daniel R. Mandell (Truman State University), Matthew Mason (Brigham Young University), Michael A. McDonnell (University of Sydney), James Paxton (Moravian College), Sarah J. Purcell (Grinnell College).
In today’s United States, the legacy of the American Revolution looms large. From presidential speeches to bestselling biographies, from conservative politics to school pageants, everybody knows something about the Revolution. Yet what was a messy, protracted, divisive, and destructive war has calcified into a glorified founding moment of the American nation. Disparate events with equally diverse participants have been reduced to a few key scenes and characters, presided over by well-meaning and wise old men.
Recollections of the Revolution did not always take today’s form. In this lively collection of essays, historians and literary scholars consider how the first three generations of American citizens interpreted their nation’s origins. The volume introduces readers to a host of individuals and groups both well known and obscure, from Molly Pitcher and “forgotten father” John Dickinson to African American Baptists in Georgia and antebellum pacifists. They show how the memory of the Revolution became politicized early in the nation’s history, as different interests sought to harness its meaning for their own ends. No single faction succeeded, and at the outbreak of the Civil War the American people remained divided over how to remember the Revolution.