| Becoming America: The Revolution Before 1776 Contributor(s): Butler, Jon (Author) |
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ISBN: 0674006674 ISBN-13: 9780674006676 Publisher: Harvard University Press OUR PRICE: $32.67 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: December 2001 Annotation: Multinational, profit-driven, materialistic, politically self-conscious, power-hungry, religiously plural: America three hundred years ago -- and today. Here are Britain's mainland American colonies after 1680, in the process of becoming the first modern society -- a society the earliest colonists never imagined, a "new order of the ages" that anticipated the American Revolution. Jon Butler's panoramic view of the colonies in this epoch transforms our customary picture of prerevolutionary America; it reveals a strikingly "modern" character that belies the eighteenth-century quaintness fixed in history. Stressing the middle and late decades (the hitherto "dark ages") of the American colonial experience, and emphasizing the importance of the middle and southern colonies as well as New England, Becoming America shows us transformations before 1776 among an unusually diverse assortment of peoples. Here is a polyglot population of English, Indians, Africans, Scots, Germans, Swiss, Swedes, and French; a society of small colonial cities with enormous urban complexities; an economy of prosperous farmers thrust into international market economies; peoples of immense wealth, a burgeoning middle class, and incredible poverty. Butler depicts settlers pursuing sophisticated provincial politics that ultimately sparked revolution and a new nation; developing new patterns in production, consumption, crafts, and trades that remade commerce at home and abroad; and fashioning a society remarkably pluralistic in religion, whose tolerance nonetheless did not extend to Africans or Indians. Here was a society that turned protest into revolution and remade itself many times during the next centuries -- asociety that, for ninety years before 1776, was becoming America. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - History | United States - Colonial Period (1600-1775) |
| Dewey: 973.2 |
| LCCN: 99054646 |
| Physical Information: 0.87" H x 6.16" W x 9.15" (1.06 lbs) 336 pages |
| Themes: - Chronological Period - 18th Century |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: Winner of the John G. Cawelti Award, Popular Culture Association and American Culture Association "We must congratulate Butler for bringing] under control a] profusion of scholarship and making] sense of it in fewer than 250 pages. H |
Contributor Bio(s): Butler, Jon: - Jon Butler is William Robertson Coe Professor of American Studies and History, and Professor of Religious Studies, at Yale University. |