guychet

Modern Americans understand the Bill of Rights differently than did early-Americans.

What effect did life in America have on English colonists? Did it transform them from conventional Englishmen into something else – Americans? Americans & non-Americans have pondered this question ever since 1776, & it was always tied to the question of why Americans seceded from the British Empire. The debate, therefore, is whether American independence was a product of slow, gradual Americanization, or a product of Anglicization (that is, a product of the colonists’ English identity & culture).

US History textbooks provide a view of colonial and Revolutionary history from the perspective of the early-national period. Looking back at the Revolution from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they paint the Revolution as a product of long incremental cultural change in America; a process by which uniquely American circumstances – ethnic diversity, slavery, economic and demographic dynamism, and other effects of expanding frontiers – produced uniquely American traits in the colonists. This process of Americanization gradually differentiated and alienated Americans from their compatriots and government across the Atlantic. Specialists on the colonial era, by contrast, are generally more skeptical regarding Americanization and the alleged cultural divide between provincials and Britons; they are more likely to see the Atlantic as a cultural bridge than a barrier. Colonialists thus tend to view the Revolution as an event that reflected the settlers' English identity and beliefs, rather than as the national event it became retrospectively, in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Within this framework, the Revolution emerges as not as a tax revolt or war for national liberation, but as a constitutional crisis, in which rebels saw themselves not as advocates for change, but as reversing the clock to restore the old order.

The American Revolution was launched to resist change, not to enact change.

Colonial failures, imperial triumphs and the loss of the American colonies: warfare and bureaucratic expansion in British America In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the American mainland colonies were not the center of Great Britain’s empire. At the economic center were the sugar islands of the West Indies that provided the financial basis for naval conquests of new Caribbean territories and more trading posts. They also financed the establishment and expansion of American mainland colonies, such as the Carolinas, and boosted the economies of all the mainland colonies, from Georgia to Massachusetts. That the American colonies were on the periphery of England’s empire and on the periphery of its attention is evident from England’s allocation of limited military and naval resources to North America in the seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries. By the Revolutionary era, however, the government in London had become increasingly interested in American affairs. After the conclusion of the French and Indian War in 1763, Great Britain left ten regiments permanently stationed in these colonies, maintained permanent naval bases on the Great Lakes and along the Atlantic coast (including Halifax and Louisburg, two of the most strongly fortified naval bases in the New World) and established a permanent military presence in the American West, complete with roads, bridges and modern forts. Moreover, for the first time since the administrations of Charles II and James II, imperial administrators attempted to use those naval, military and financial resources to centralize the administration of these colonies, to regulate and govern them more effectively, and to integrate them more fully into the British state. By the end of the French and Indian War, then, these colonies were no longer peripheral to the Empire. This transformation explains provincial efforts in the 1760s and 70s to reestablish salutary neglect as an imperial policy. This shift was certainly a reflection of the mainland colonies’ growing economic and demographic weight, but it was also occasioned and aided by a lack of military success on the part of colonial governments. Imperial forces, as well as imperial investment in military infrastructure, were drawn into North America because provincial governments and imperial administrators became more and more frustrated with the military incompetence displayed by colonial military establishments. Provincial failures in in the 1670s and during King William’s War (1689-97) and Queen Anne’s War (1702-13) led to a creeping enhancement of Britain’s direct military involvement in North America by the mid-eighteenth century.

Madison's Constitution reflected a starkly negative assessment of human nature & human governments. This belief system was commonplace among Anglo-Americans in the 18th century. During the 19th century, however, Americans embraced different beliefs, which allowed them to trust the Federal Government, identify with it, bond with it emotionally, look to it for moral and political leadership, and to expect numerous services and protections from it. This philosophical transformation explains Americans’ growing frustration with life under an eighteenth-century Constitution animated by distrust and fear of central governance. Americans have tried, since 1791, to liberate their national government from the Constitutional constraints placed on it by Madison and his colleagues. This effort has accelerated dramatically in the twentieth century, when Americans devised a new way to read the Constitution; a new way to apply it to their daily lives. This innovation in Constitutional jurisprudence has been pivotal in the transformation of the United States from a federated republic in which local communities governed themselves into a modern managerial nation state that is governed from the center. The key to this transformation – of the Constitution & of the United States – was the 14th Amendment.

Brief discussion of the book (Guy Chet, Conquering the American Wilderness: The Triumph of European Warfare in the Colonial Northeast).

Who gets credit for victory in the American Revolution -- the Continental Army of the militia? The US or France? Or Spain?

The American & French Revolutions are not sister revolutions. They reflecting opposing views of society and advanced opposing political programs.

Why did common folks support the elites in the Revolution?

On Thanksgiving & its debunkers. On Thanksgiving becoming a national holiday in the midst of great wars (the Civil War & WWII).

The uniquely English fear of government is responsible for the uniquely English impulse to produce written constitutions, from Magna Carta, through the English Bill of Rights, to the American state & national constitutions.

In the 1st & 2nd centuries AD, Judea launched two major rebellions against the Roman Empire. These revolts represented a major military challenge to Rome, but it suppressed them both with brutal efficiency. Rome's Jewish Wars had a tremendous impact on Jewish history -- putting an end to Jewish sovereignty in Judea, precipitating the Jews' 2,000-year exile from their homeland, and changing the practice of Jewish worship -- but it also had an important impact on Roman history, by bringing about the final split between Jews & Christians. This transformed Christianity into a persecuted religion that eventually supplanted the Roman religion. These Jewish Wars have also had a strong impact on the modern state of Israel. From its inception in the 1880s, the Jewish national movement (Zionism) sought to reverse the effects of these ancient wars -- to return Jews from their global diaspora to their ancient homeland, revive Jewish statehood in the land of Israel, and revive the Jewish language (Hebrew). For this reason, Zionists used these Jewish rebellions from the classical era as a central element in their effort to convince & inspire Jews in the modern era to accept Zionism's core values, beliefs, and objectives.

American Jews hail from Yiddish-speaking communities in Eastern Europe. They exhibit great uniformity in sociological profile, skin color, cultural and political sensibilities, and religious habits. By contrast, Israel is a mix of Jewish identities and cultures – most Israeli Jews hail from Sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa, the Middle East, or central Asia. Israel therefore exhibits great diversity in cultural and linguistic background, religious tradition, skin color, and cultural and political sensibilities. These differences between American and Israeli Jews breed misconceptions American society about Israel. In short, Americans generally assume that Israelis look, think, and act like the Jews they know from their American neighborhoods, classrooms, workplaces, and television shows. Unaware of other kinds of Jewish identities, Americans assume a level of understanding about Israel that they do not presume with regard to other foreign countries/cultures. Israel represents a useful and accessible case study for how Americans perceive foreign cultures through the prism of the American experience. This talk illustrates how cultural bias can shape foreign relations.

The military adventures of the English colonists in New England illuminated the tensions between American conditions and European military conventions. Successful Indian attacks on colonial forces have led some contemporary and modern observers to conclude that the combination of firearms and Indian tactics was too potent for English forces, relying on conventional European tactics. Consequently, it has been argued, exposure to Indian tactics improved the effectiveness of English military forces, as battlefield experience forced colonial commanders to “unlearn” what their European military manuals had taught them. Thus, only by utilizing the Indians' tactical methods against them were colonial commanders able to reverse the tide of Indian victories, achieve tactical success against Indian forces and, consequently, attain victory. This “Americanization” thesis, which fits neatly into the construct of American Exceptionalism (the historiographical notion that the United States is suigeneris, rather than an extension of European history and culture), is based primarily on the reputations of Benjamin Church and Robert Rogers as successful and innovative Indian fighters. Yet the military records of both did not impress their peers and superiors (in provincial and imperial military establishments), although their literary accounts of their exploits certainly did win them both fame as popular heroes and professional respect as commanders among the general public and nationalist historians of the nineteenth century. The misadventures of provincial forces during the colonial wars – including those of Church and Rogers – indicate that English soldiery did not improve when "textbook knowledge of European tactics" was complemented by experience in wilderness warfare. In fact, a comparison between the first generation of New England's military commanders (European veterans) and the supposedly "Americanized" commanders of the later colonial wars reflects poorly on the latter. Moreover, the colonists' military ordeals along the northern frontiers during the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries did not lead to a reevaluation and transformation of their military doctrine. Rather than revitalizing the settlers' military establishments, these episodes highlighted the ongoing degeneration of colonial armed forces. In fact, it was the poor performance of colonial forces in King Philip's War and King William's War that led eighteenth-century colonial magistrates to address the shortcomings of their military forces through a greater reliance on British forces and imperial administrators. Thus, English military achievements in the northeast during the eighteenth century reflected an increasing degree of British participation, as well as British planning, administration, and command. In fact, the army's tactical victories during the Seven Years War, as well as the American Revolution, indicate that British regulars were more successful than provincials and militia in countering the challenges of wilderness warfare. The transmission of European military culture to the periphery of the empire was a typical characteristic of a transatlantic English civilization. When examined within the context of imperial history, the story of warfare, politics, and culture in colonial North America reads as a process by which the colonies gravitated toward England’s cultural and administrative sphere of influence, rather than attempting to liberate themselves from it.

The practice of insuring ships and cargoes against risks at sea insulated merchants and investors from much of the damage caused by commerce raiding while allowing them to continue reaping the benefits of wartime commerce. Since insurance underwriters were the primary victims of commerce raiding, it was the marine insurance sector, rather than the merchant class as a whole, that took the lead in trying to suppress commerce raiding. This effort to suppress commerce raiding was part of a much larger project undertaken by underwriter associations to reduce shipping risks (as well as insurance claims). Many of these efforts involved lobbying national governments to take action at sea, but they also involved private and governmental public-relations campaigns aimed at merchants, ship owners and mariners. These public relations efforts implicitly endorsed national governments’ emerging ideology of state, or state-building. Specifically, underwriters aimed to harmonize the interests and the habits of the merchant class, on the one hand, and national governments, on the other.