Antiques.

National spirit is the natural result of national existence; and although some of the present generation may feel colonial oppositions of opinion, that generation will die away, and give place to a race of Americans.

Gouverneur Morris to John Jay, January 10, 1784

In 1815 John Adams asked Thomas Jefferson: "Who shall write the history of the American revolution? Who can write it? Who will ever be able to write it?" Jefferson replied: "Nobody; except merely it's external facts. All it's councils, designs and discussions, having been conducted by Congress with closed doors, and no member, as far as I know, having even made notes of them, these, which are the life and soul of history must for ever be unknown."

Nonetheless, the American Revolution has attracted generations of historical interpretation. At the outset it was seen as a heroic moral struggle for liberty against British tyranny, with the participants either heroes or villains. Then, through much of the nineteenth century, the Revolution lost its personal character and became the ordained fulfillment of the American people's democratic destiny This view was largely the work of George Bancroft, who pictured the Revolution as a great democratic movement by a united people. When Abraham Lincoln, in the middle of the Civil War, tried to define the significance of the United States, he saw that the Revolution had convinced Americans that they were a special people with the destiny to lead the world toward liberty. The Revolution, in short, gave birth to the country's sense of nationhood.

Only with the twentieth century and the advent of professional historians did the Revolution become something more than a colonial rebellion or an intellectual event. As Carl Becker put it, the Revolution was not only about home rule but also about "who should rule at home." Arthur ...