Drink hard, pray hard and simply vanish

Jack Rakove

  • Becoming America: The Revolution Before 1776 by Jon Butler
    Harvard, 324 pp, £19.50, May 2000, ISBN 0 674 00091 9
  • Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans by Joyce Appleby
    Harvard, 322 pp, £17.95, May 2000, ISBN 0 674 00236 9

Did the 13 mainland colonies of British North America become America before their inhabitants thought of themselves as Americans? That is the question raised by these two books. Each is a work of scholarly synthesis; each deals rather uneasily with the epochal event – the Revolution – that separates their respective periods; each is finally concerned with the onset of modernity in the world’s ‘first new nation’, as Seymour Martin Lipset described the United States.

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