| Book Reviews | The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 131.1

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| Book Reviews | The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 131.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Reviews

Stories of Independence: Identity, Ideology, and History in Eighteenth-Century America. By Peter C. Messer. (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005. 258p. Appendices, notes, works cited, index. $39.)

If the American Revolutionary War had a corresponding revolution in the writing of history, when did it occur? Lester Cohen's The Revolutionary Histories (1980) argues that the Revolutionary War ushered in dramatic changes in the writing of history, ending providential history and laying the path towards the romantic. Arthur Shaffer's The Politics of History (1975) looks at history writing after the Revolutionary War and the rise of nationalism. But change is a two-way street. If how we perceive ourselves changes the way we write about our past, shouldn't the reverse also be the case? In Stories of Independence, Peter Messer argues that the dramatic changes in history writing began long before the Revolutionary War, starting as early as 1705, and these changes both reflected and facilitated the creation of an American identity. For Messer, American historians redefined empire and created an identity for a distinct people that was crucial to "transforming resistance to unpopular imperial policies into a revolution" (p. 73).

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