The fount of authority in America before the Revolution was the British king. His summary of a society that seems almost as archaic as Medieval Europe makes for a delightful read. Wood begins by sketching colonial life, focusing on the political, economic, and social hierarchy that stemmed from the monarchical system. In just a few years the events of the 1770s had dramatically transformed American society, turning it into one “unlike any that had ever existed anywhere in the world,” writes Wood. But Wood, a professor of history at Brown University, contends that however tame the actual rebellion against Great Britain, the ultimate social results were far more dramatic than could have ever been imagined. And “if we measure the radicalism of revolutions by the degree of social misery or economic deprivation suffered, or by the number of people killed or manor houses burned, then this conventional emphasis” is warranted, writes Gordon Wood in The Radicalism of the American Revolution. The American Revolution is traditionally thought of as a rather conservative affair, a bourgeois revolt against imperious royal rule that kept public affairs out of the hands of the masses.
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