American REvolution (Unit I)

Here we approach the third leg of (Unit I) -- The American Revolution. When most Americans think of the American Revolution, they think of the events that took place between the battles at Lexington and Concord (1775) and the Treaty of Paris (1783). And yet most historians who have studied early America assert that the real American Revolution began years before the first shots were fired and needed several decades to determine the nature and character of that momentous event. Therefore, in order to understand the real revolution, we must begin somewhere in the mid-18th century and conclude our study after the signing of the Constitution.

In Pulitzer Prize winning historian and professor Walter McDougall's stimulating book Freedom Just Around the Corner: A New American History, 1585-1828 (2004), McDougall claims that the “creation of the United States of America is the central event of the past four hundred years.” And when Americans have not always lived up to the hopes they felt and expressed in 1776, it cannot be denied that those hopes still exist and are still expressed by Americans from Thomas Jefferson to Andrew Jackson to Abraham Lincoln to Woodrow Wilson to Eleanor Roosevelt to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to all those men and women who settled the frontier, led lives of decency, cast their ballots, defended their nation, and kept alive the hopes of the generation historians refer to as the Founders.