The American Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis

“Beginning in the 1950s, a new generation of scholars began to reemphasize the role of ideology and to de-emphasize the role of economic interests. Robert E. Brown, in 1955, and Edmund S. Morgan, in 1956, both argued that most eighteenth-century white American, regardless of station, shared basic political principles and that the social and economic conflicts that progressives had identified were not severe. The rhetoric of the Revolution, they suggested, was not propaganda, but a real reflection of the colonist’s ideas” (Brinley 134-5). “Everyone has economic interests,” Gary Nash has written, “and everyone… has an ideology” (Brinkley 135). “Bernard Bailyn, in The Ideological Origins of the American Revolutions (1967), demonstrated the complex