Reviews of Books

Whose Revolution Was It, Anyway?

Gary J. Kornblith

Last Refuge of Scoundrels: A Revolutionary Novel. By PAUL LUSSIER. (New York: Warner Books, 2000. Pp. vi, 313. $26.95.)

To judge from The New York Times bestseller list, history of the revolutionary era is back in fashion among the American reading public. As this review is being written, David McCullough's John Adams holds the top position and Joseph J. Ellis's Founding Brothers ranks number five. 1 For those who worry about Americans' supposed lack of historical knowledge and consciousness, these rankings may be cause to celebrate. But for champions of "history from the bottom up," the popularity of studies focusing on the Founding Fathers is less comforting. The erstwhile "new" social historians have had a major impact on college textbooks and college curricula over the past twenty-five years, but they seem not to have captured the hearts and minds of a nonacademic audience. The publication of Ray Raphael's and Paul Lussier's works of popular history--one factual, the other fictional--provides an occasion to reflect on what a generation of scholarly "history from the bottom up" has and has not wrought.	1
"Real people, not paper heroes, made and endured the American Revolution" (p. 1), proclaims Raphael in his introduction to A People's History of the American Revolution. It is hardly an original declaration, but in this initial volume of the New Press's Peoples History Series, edited by Howard Zinn, Raphael succeeds admirably in bringing to life the excitement, upheaval, and complexity of plebeian Americans' participation in the War of Independence. Drawing on a broad array of published eyewitness accounts and displaying a firm command of recent social-historical scholarship, he offers a reliable, extensively documented, and frequently riveting account of how various bodies of "the people" tried to make the Revolution their own with differing degrees of success. The result is less a new view of the Revolution than a highly readable version of a perspective already well established in the halls of academe.	2
After an initial chapter devoted to the emergence of broad-based resistance to British measures between 1765 and 1774, Raphael focuses seriatim on five groups usually relegated to secondary (or smaller) roles in single-volume histories of "the glorious cause": poor and middling white men and boys, white women, loyalists and pacifists, Native Americans, and African Americans. His sympathies clearly lie with the marginal and the downtrodden, but the stories he tells are not sentimental tales of political correctness. Instead, he highlights the tenuousness of patriotic commitment and the hardships of everyday life. While he gives examples of heroic military service, his larger theme is the horror of war. "The peculiar character of a civil war, with its feedback cycle of escalating violence," he explains, "inspired a passion for revenge, each atrocity justifying a more brutal response" (p. 82). Under such circumstances, common soldiers fought not for abstract conceptions of liberty but for personal survival by any means necessary.	. . .