The American Revolution: Writings from the Pamphlet Debate 1773-1776: (Library of America #266)

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For the 250th anniversary of the start of the American Revolution, acclaimed historian Gordon S. Wood presents a landmark collection of British and American pamphlets from the political debate that divided an empire and created a nation: In 1764, in the wake of its triumph in the Seven Years War, Great Britain possessed the largest and most powerful empire the world had seen since the fall of Rome and its North American colonists were justly proud of their vital place within this global colossus. Just twelve short years later the empire used to be in tatters, and the thirteen colonies proclaimed themselves the free and independent United States of The us. In between, there occurred an atypical contest of words between American and Britons, and among Americans themselves, which addressed the entire most fundamental issues of politics: the nature of power, liberty, representation, rights and constitutions, and sovereignty. This debate used to be carried on in large part in pamphlets and from the more than a thousand published on both sides of the Atlantic right through the period Gordon S. Wood has selected thirty-nine of the most interesting and important to reveal as never before how this momentous revolution unfolded. This second of two volumes follows the course of the ultimate crisis that led from the Boston Tea Party to the final break, as the focal point of debate turns from questions of representation and rights to the an important issue of sovereignty. Here is a young Thomas Jefferson offering his radical Summary View of the Rights of British The us; Samuel Johnson pronouncing Taxation no Tyranny and asking “How is that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty a few of the drivers of negros?”; Edmund Burke trying to hold the empire together in his famous Speech on Conciliation; and Thomas Paine turning the focal point of American animus from Parliament to king in the in reality revolutionary pamphlet Common Sense. The volume includes an introduction, headnotes, a chronology of events, biographical notes about the writers, and detailed explanatory notes, all prepared by our leading expert on the American Revolution. As a special feature, each pamphlet is preceded by a typographic reproduction of its original title page.

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