Abstract
The field of the American Revolution is garnering more scholarly attention than in years past, with the publication of some high-profi le texts (Claudio Saunt’s West of the Revolution in 2014 and Kathleen DuVal’s Independence Lost in 2015) and a substantial conference in 2013 on the topic at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. We have yet to see where this attention will lead. It has been decades since such scholars as Bernard Bailyn, Gordon S. Wood, and Alfred Young set the parameters of a debate that pitted an exceptional, ideologically driven, radical revolution (often called the neo-Whig argument by its critics) against an unfinished, materially driven, conservative revolution that left many peoples outside of its consideration (often called the neo-Progressive argument). Many scholars hope that the recent attention to the f i eld will lead to narratives that transcend this seemingly intractable binary. This volume, which comes out of a 2010 Ohio University conference on violence and sovereignty during the American Revolution, highlights both the possibilities and the limitations of the new thinking in the field.