“The American Revolution has always seemed to be an extraordinary kind of revolution, and no more so than to the Revolutionaries themselves.”
This long history of the formation of the American Republic begins with an introduction by Gordon Wood about 30 years after its initial publication. This new introduction suggests a shift in thinking both in himself and the general consensus about the role of “republicanism” in the formation of the new republic. This focus helps to frame a little more of the reading here and you can trace the way in which Wood explores the concept in the original history, and imagining what he might say later. Apparently other works do shift his thinking on it, but those come later. For now, it’s interesting to look at how this idea is being shaped in the interpretation presented here.
This came in the late 1960s and is more or less connected with Bernard Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Both explore the ideological questions at play in the creation of American Republic. Wood’s focuses especially in the creation of the constitution, the debates over the forms of government, and the decisions that would shape where we went as a nation, and find ourselves now. In general, republicanism is the idea of forming a republic, built on representation of the people in government itself through some form of democracy or representation, but more broadly on a general distrust of nobility and aristocracy, and an expanding of rights to the common man and in their ability to be a part of both creating and understanding those rights.
The book doesn’t only write about that specifically, but it’s the backdrop of the book which also goes into pretty specific detail about things like the branches of government, the courts, the bicameral legislature, etc. It’s dense, but interesting, and even more so if the idea is that “historians” have moved on from some of its basic assumptions.