The dominant figure in The American Revolution is Rick Atkinson, a distinguished former Washington Post journalist and military historian who has already published one trilogy on the liberation of Europe in World War II and published two volumes of another trilogy on the Revolutionary War. Thankfully, Atkinson carries none of Foote’s ideological baggage. He is not here to carry the flag of the Loyalists, a subject that one of his colleagues on the program, Maya Jasanoff of Harvard, has covered quite well in her scholarship. Atkinson’s approach is purely military, and it is well complemented by the English historian, Stephen Conway. It is crucial to recall that the strategic initiative in the war always resided with the British. As heroic as the American fight proved, as many difficulties as it had to overcome, one can only understand the war by giving the British side an equal part in the story.
Much of this military history, though, is still old news for historians and even general viewers. Where the series breaks ground is in its descriptions of the war’s impact on different groups of Americans or, more neutrally, on different inhabitants of British North America. Scholarly work on the American Revolution over the last quarter century has had two main themes. One involves the war’s effect on the general population, or what we call the social history of the Revolution. It is not simply a question of who took which side, but rather a matter of how individuals, families, and communities, or ethnic and racial groups, coped with the opportunities the Revolution created and the costs its duration imposed.
The second main theme concerns the geographical diversity of North America, what scholars now call “Vast Early America.” Histories of the Revolution long emphasized the role of the major port towns, from Boston to Charles Town (soon to become Charleston). Much of the American countryside mattered only when the armies straggled over their terrain. In fact, the Revolution had profound impacts across the Appalachians and from the Great Plains to the Gulf of Mexico.
But the political history of the Revolution—its origins, innovations, consequences—remains the strangely understated part of the story. In the final episode, just before we hear Dr. Rush’s concluding remarks, we listen to a few platitudinous sentences on the Constitutional Convention that would barely pass muster in a junior high school textbook. The two premier analysts of the Revolution’s political origins and its constitutional consequences—my late mentor, Bernard Bailyn, and his most distinguished student, Gordon S. Wood—do make a few brief appearances here and there. But their remarkable effort to describe the transformative impact of the Revolution on American governance, politics, and culture never seeps through.
