| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Larry E. Tise. The American Counterrevolution: A Retreat from Liberty, 1783–1800. Mechanicsburg, Pa.: Stackpole. 1998. Pp. l, 634. $49.95.

Some readers will love this book; others, I suspect, will hate it. Either way, weighing in at almost seven hundred pages and over two hundred thousand words of text, it will be hard to ignore. Larry E. Tise argues that the American Revolution began as a liberating movement for universal freedom and equality. These principles, as stated in the preamble of the Declaration of Independence, set in motion a general revolutionary ferment among oppressed peoples both in colonial society—notably women and blacks—and abroad, especially in England and France. The first third of the book focuses as much on the impact that the French Revolution had on the Atlantic world between 1789 and 1792 as on developments in the United States. Tise develops his case through numerous biographical sketches of figures not usually considered together: prominent French refugees who played a part in the early stages of the French Revolution before coming to the United States, English refugee radicals like Joseph Priestley and Thomas Cooper, proto-feminists (both European and American), and blacks (both West Indian and American). They constitute a chorus whose members demonstrated through their behavior as much as through their thought that they construed the preamble of the Declaration as a clarion call for the general liberation of humankind. Most of the traditional "Founding Fathers" yield precedence to this new constituency as authorities for defining what Tise takes to be the guiding principles of the American Revolution. . . .

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