| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Stories of Independence: Identity, Ideology, and History in Eighteenth-Century America. By Peter C. Messer. (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005. x, 258 pp. $39.00, ISBN 0-87580-350-4.)

In her 1805 account of the American Revolution, Mercy Otis Warren observed that the nation's progress had been so swift that its founding principles were "nearly annihilated" and its leaders largely "forgotten" (History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution, ed. Lester H. Cohen, vol. 1, 1989, p. 4). She thus saw her history as something more than a mere chronicle of events; it was meant as both a memorial to the founders and moral instruction to the young republic. Peter C. Messer's Stories of Independence places Warren's work within a larger effort among eighteenth-century historians to fashion a distinctly American identity and republican ideology that combined tenets of Scottish Enlightenment thought with the everyday experiences of community in early America. In so doing, his penetrating study, drawn from an analysis of over fifty histories, reconsiders not only the intellectual origins of the republic, but also the oft-forgotten role of historians such as Warren in its construction.

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