Rethinking America From Empire to Republic

For five decades John M. Murrin has been the consummate historian's historian. This volume brings together his seminal essays on the American Revolution, the United States Constitution, and the early American Republic. Collectively, they rethink fundamental questions regarding American identity, the decision to declare independence in 1776, and the impact the American Revolution had on the nation it produced.

By digging deeply into questions that have shaped the field for several generations, Rethinking America argues that high politics and the study of constitutional and ideological questions--broadly the history of elites--must be considered in close conjunction with issues of economic inequality, class conflict, and racial division. Bringing together different schools of history and a variety of perspectives on both Britain and the North American colonies, it explains why what began as a constitutional argument, that virtually all expected would remain contained within the British Empire, exploded into a truly subversive and radical revolution that destroyed monarchy and aristocracy and replaced them with a rapidly transforming and chaotic republic. This volume examines the period of the early American Republic and discusses why the Founders' assumptions about what their Revolution would produce were profoundly different than the society that emerged from the American Revolution. In many ways, Rethinking America suggests that the outcome of the American Revolution put the new United States on a path to a violent and bloody civil war.


With an introduction by Andrew Shankman, this long-awaited work by one of the most important scholars of the Revolutionary era offers a coherent interpretation of the complex period that saw the breakdown of colonial British North America and the founding of the United States.

John M. Murrin is one of the foremost scholars of early America. He was professor of history at Princeton University for thirty years and is the author of over fifty essays and the co-author of the textbook Liberty, Equality, Power.

Andrew Shankman is associate professor of history at Rutgers University-Camden. He is the author of Original Intents: Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, and the American Founding (OUP, 2017), among other titles.

Preface and Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Revolutionary Republic of a Radical, Imperial, Whig: The Historical and Historiographical Imagination of John M. Murrin- Andrew Shankman

Part I: An Overview
Chapter 1: The Great Inversion, or, Court versus Country: A Comparison of the Revolution Settlements in England (1688-1721) and America (1776-1816)

Part II: Toward Revolution
Chapter 2: No Awakening, No Revolution? More Counterfactual Speculations
Chapter 3: The French and Indian War, the American Revolution, and the Counterfactual Hypothesis: Reflections on Lawrence Henry Gipson and John Shy
Chapter 4: Feudalism, Communalism, and the Yeoman Freeholder: The American Revolution Considered as a Social Accident (with Rowland Berthoff)
Chapter 5: 1776: The Countercyclical Revolution

Part III: Defining the Republic
Chapter 6: A Roof Without Walls: The Dilemma of American National Identity
Chapter 7: Fundamental Values, the Founding Fathers, and the Constitution
Chapter 8: The Making and Unmaking of an American Ruling Class (with Gary J. Kornblith)
Chapter 9: Escaping Perfidious Albion: Federalism, Fear of Aristocracy, and the Democratization of Corruption in Postrevolutionary America
Chapter 10: War, Revolution, and Nation-Making: The American Revolution versus the Civil War

Conclusion: Self-Immolation: Schools of Historiography and the Coming of the American Revolution