| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Soldiers' Revolution: Pennsylvanians in Arms and the Forging of Early American Identity. By Gregory T. Knouff. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004. xxiv, 312 pp. $45.00, ISBN 0-271-02335-X.)
The Soldiers' Revolution is an important contribution to the study of American identity and to historiography through its application of concepts of "whiteness," "masculinity," and "localism" to the American Revolution and its legacy. Gregory T. Knouff uses those concepts to analyze enlistments, warfare, and communities in three regions of Pennsylvania.	1
Knouff's thesis is that Revolutionary War soldiers and veterans transformed the United States into a "localist white male nation." Rather than being Whigs, mercenaries, or "pawns of an elite," these men, who were on the margins of society prior to the war, had their own world view, localism, and were "active in shaping their own future—and that of the nation" (p. xiii). Knouff argues that the expansion of their power and freedom was "predicated on racism, male dominance, and the obfuscation of class conflict" (p. xxiii). He bases these sweeping interpretations on pieces of evidence found in diaries, pension records, and actions used as proxies for people's beliefs.	. . .

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