The Unruly Revolution

The Unruly Revolution The Unknown American Revolution The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America by Gary B. Nash New York: Viking Penguin Group, 2005 492 pp + index. Hardcover: $27.95; paperback: $16.

GARY NASH'S THE Unknown American Revolution fully discloses its aims to propagate both historical and social lessons. Nash retells the story of the American Revolution, complicating and radicalizing its core narrative as "a people's revolution, an upheaval among the most heterogeneous people to be found anywhere along the Atlantic littoral in the eighteenth century."

The characters in The Unknown American Revolution "looked toward a redistribution of political, social, and religious power; the discarding of old institutions and the creation of new ones; the overthrowing of ingrained patterns of conservative, elitist thought; the leveling of society so that top and bottom were not widely separated; the end of the nightmare of slavery and genocidal intentions of land-crazed frontiersmen; the hope of women of achieving a public voice." (xvii)

Through highlighting the lives of these revolutionaries, Nash first reminds readers of the Revolution's heterogeneous nature and sets out to cure the historical amnesia that plagues America. In doing this, Nash opens a second, simultaneous conversation, alive and interactive with the reader in a way that some textbook writers might well fear and loathe.

Through telling the stories of so many disenfranchised, so many poor, enslaved and so many ordinary people turned revolutionaries, Nash teaches that ordinary people do make history and in fact, do make revolutions. While the interests of the emerging ruling class, represented by George Washington, John Adams and the other familiar founders, determined the immediate outcomes of the American Revolution, common people played crucial roles in the spirit of the era and the continuation of the social revolution.

Common people throughout history have been a powerful force once activated by hunger for food, liberty and justice, and their stories must be told. Innate in this lesson is that the rich and famous do not have the monopoly on history making, though as Aldous Huxley asserted, "liberties are not given, they are taken." Nash seems to say, however quietly in the pages of this history, that the disenfranchised majority can and must stop waiting to be given liberties and...