Bell+Work+-+Varying+Viewpoints+of+the+American+Revolution

For your bell work today, I want you to read the two following viewpoints about the American Revolution and be prepared to discuss the questions below.


 * Carl L. Becker, //Beginnings of the American People// (1915).**

He takes a "progressive" view of the Revolution, meaning that it was the product of social conflict among colonial groups.

"It was the opposition of interests in America that chiefly made men extremists on either side. Those men who wished to take a safe middle ground, who wished neither to renounce their country nor to mark themselves as rebels, could no longer hold together."


 * Bernard Bailyn, //The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution// (1967).**

He takes an "ideological" view of the Revolution, meaning that the Revolution resulted from the colonists' ideas about liberty and power.

"The colonists believed they saw emerging from the welter of events during the decade after the Stamp Act a pattern whose meaning was unmistakable... They saw about them, with increasing clarity, no merely mistaken, or even evil, policies violating the principles upon which freedom rested, but what appeared to be evidence of nothing less than a deliberate assault launched surreptitiously by plotters against liberty both in England and in America... This belief transformed the meaning of the colonists' struggle, and it added an inner accelerator to the movement of opposition... It was this... that signaled to the colonists after 1763, and it was this above all else that in the end propelled them to Revolution."

1. According to each of these viewpoints, what provided the fuel that drove the colonists from particular political disagreements to revolutionary assertion of independence? (In other words, what is the main point that each author is making.)
 * __Discussion Questions__**

2. How would each of these historians interpret the common view of the American Revolution as a fight for liberty?

3. How would the sequence of events leading up to the Revolution for example, the Stamp Act and the Boston Tea Party) be treated according to each of these perspectives?