As we begin commemorating “America 250,” historians continue to debate what caused the American Revolution. Historians were doing the same thing around the time of America 150 and advancing new insights and interpretations. As is often the case in our field, we can gain some insights by looking back at how our predecessor historians approached things. Many of their ideas may seem familiar to us today because they inspired and helped shape future scholarship on the Revolution down to the present.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, historians, many of them gifted writers without formal history training, had mostly painted a simple, patriotic picture when explaining what caused the Revolution: blame the British for their oppressive policies, heap praise on the patriots for their courage and determination.
By the 1920s, a new generation of historians, many of them the products of recently established history Ph.D. programs, and more inclined to delve into archival records and other original sources, presented deeper, more complex interpretations of the Revolution.
Their work was timely. There was rising professional and public interest around the sesquicentennial and 150th anniversary commemorations in many states and communities. Congress created a commission early in 1926 to encourage sesquicentennial activities around the country. Over six million people attended the grand Sesquicentennial Exposition in Philadelphia. President Calvin Coolidge gave an oration there about the Declaration of Independence on July 5. There was in the same period spirited public discussion over whether school history texts were too lenient on the British and too critical of patriots for bringing on the war.
The works of several historians are presented below, selected because they were leading-edge and influential at the time and articulated new perspectives, some of which are still useful. Some of the authors boosted this leavening effect along by their additional writings and through the many students they educated. Their leadership in the profession helped, too., e.g., Charles M. Andrews, Charles A. Beard, Carl Becker, J. Franklin Jameson, Charles Howard McIlwain and Arthur M. Schlesinger all served as presidents of the American Historical Association.
These historians based their work on extensive research and solid evidence. They conveyed their own interpretations—but explained those interpretations and backed them up with citations to original documents and other primary sources. Furthermore, they were practitioners of “history with a purpose,” to use the term of a later historian C. Vann Woodward in his book Thinking Back: The Perils of Writing History (1986). Historian James Harvey Robinson, a contemporary of the Sesquicentennial Era writers, put it this way in his 1912 book The New History: Essays Demonstrating the Modern Historical Outlook: “History is…. ever-changing, and it will, if we will permit it, illuminate and explain our lives as nothing else can do. For our lives are made up almost altogether of the past and each age should feel free to select from the annals of the past those matters which have a bearing on the matters it has specially at heart.”