“‘The use of travelling,’ Doctor Johnson wrote Mrs. Thrale ‘is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking about how things may be, to see them as they are.’ Johnson spoke for the age in this desire to see things as they are and to avoid the dangerous imaginings of how they may be.”
This is a large catch-all history of the English colonies and eventually the United States from 1763-89 (from the end of the French and Indian War to the ratification of the constitution). While I have read various other books about this set of history in the meantime (and played Assassin’s Creed III twice), I hadn’t studied this time period in this kind of way probably since in AP Us History in 1998. And since my strongest periods of that class we’re the Civil War, this was a weak spot.
I still have a hard time taking in large swaths of history like this without multiple additional sources reinforcing my understanding (I understand arguments and narratives more directly than histories). Anyway, this book is not going to challenge any preconceived notions about the United States for a lot of people. It’s part of the Oxford US history series that also includes Battle Cry of Freedom, and the clear goal of the series is broad consensus history. So while there’s plenty of discussion about the role of slavery in the forming of the union, the compromises of the constitution, and other places where there’s need, there’s not a concentrated focus on it. That’s the more recent trend in histories: to either really emphasize the role of slavery or to pretend like it wasn’t actually a major point.
Middlekauff, though, is interested in mostly taking historical figures at their word and trying to figure out what to do with them. What’s interesting to me is how slight the American Revolution always feels from a military perspective, and here, so much else is happening that it’s hard to remember that a war is happening. It’s a solid, if a little light, analysis of the political conversations in the constitutional conventions. There’s also some interesting looks at how specific immigrant groups helped sow the seeds of rebellion, having self-selected to leave their home countries in the first place. This is a great scene-setting, broad history. A bit like a textbook, but much more readable.