India/western Sociology

[dhu]

[url="http://www.amazon.com/Creation-America-Through-Revolution-Empire/dp/0521664810"]The Creation of America: Through Revolution to Empire[/url]

Francis Jennings

From Publishers Weekly



A longstanding historian of colonial America, Jennings (Benjamin Franklin, Politician, etc.), the former director of the Center for the History of the American Indian at the Newberry Library, is tired of the traditional celebratory story of the American Revolution. "My book," he writes, "is an effort to tell the Revolution for adults." Jennings examines nearly every aspectAregion by region; battle by battle; and through the eyes of Indians, the British and the colonists. Along the way, he nimbly demonstrates that the colonists, though they claimed to be fighting for liberty, were fighting for the sort of liberty that didn't extend to Native Americans or black slaves. Hardly disinterested servants of the public good, he further argues, the founding fathers were politicians looking out for their own interests. Indeed, they weren't fighting for abstract principles; the colonists didn't, in truth, favor a democratic republic over an empire. To the contrary, according to Jennings, they were very devoted to the idea of empire; they simply wanted to run it themselves rather than "acting as agents for Great Britain." Throughout, Jennings looks especially at they ways in which ideas about race helped the colonists justify certain kinds of conquest. And although he does not say much that has not been argued dozens of times before, his synthesis is provocative, useful and clearly stated.





From Booklist



From the conventional view of the American Revolution as a struggle of oppressed colonists throwing off the yoke of royal tyranny, Jennings begs to differ. He asks readers to adopt the perspective of the many enslaved African Americans and marginalized American Indians. From their viewpoint, colonists' talk of liberty and equality rang hollow. Those high-sounding sentiments were little more than war propaganda, for their lands and their persons were either confiscated or enslaved by these very "freedom fighters." Starting with the founding of the colonies, Jennings documents the European settlers' determination to create empires. It took a few decades until they came to see their empire as distinct from Britain's. Early North American maps with their undefined boundaries reveal the western pretensions and breadth of the colonists' claims. Jennings presents his provocative views in a readable style that expands the substance of his argument.