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Eliga Gould, Transactional Revolutionaries, The American Historical Review, Volume 128, Issue 1, March 2023, Pages 405–408, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhad135
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Extract
For historians of the American Revolution, there are supposed to be few more certain paths to fame and fortune than writing a flattering book about the Founders, as Woody Holton observes in the closing pages of Liberty Is Sweet. That may or may not be true. But as anyone who has followed the controversies and talking points of our own time surely knows—whether the topic is the enduring appeal of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (1980; rev. ed., 2015) or The New York Times’s 1619 Project—there is also mileage and, I suspect, decent money in books by historians whom Holton admiringly calls “the debunkers” (568). As the “hidden history” in his title suggests, that debunking tradition is where Holton situates his latest contribution to scholarship on the revolution.
Although readers looking for famous men and women will not be disappointed, Holton’s primary interest is the history of “women, Native Americans, African Americans, and other unknown Americans,” including poor white men (568). Some of his hidden actors are better known today than they were in their own time. Boston King, who escaped enslavement in South Carolina by joining the British army, features prominently in my own teaching and writing, as I’m sure he does for many of my colleagues. Others are familiar names in unfamiliar places. I confess that I did not know that Daniel Boone started his fabled career as a wagon driver in General Edward Braddock’s ill-fated expedition to the Monongahela in 1755—this despite growing up in one of the Pennsylvania valleys that Boone and Braddock marched on Fort Duquesne to secure. The role of female war and peace chiefs in Pontiac’s War, the Native insurgency that swept the Midwest during the mid-1760s, will come as no surprise to specialists, but it may surprise general readers, who are the book’s intended audience. Britain responded by stationing an army of ten thousand regulars in Indian country, which in turn supplied the pretext for the parliamentary taxes that so outraged colonists on the Atlantic seaboard. Had the Wabash River’s Indigenous matrons “not founded a pan-Indian confederacy to battle the British,” writes Holton, the American Revolution might not have happened (160).
