Reluctant Revolutionaries

The question of why New Yorkers were such reluctant revolutionaries has long bedeviled historians. In an innovative study of New York City between 1763 and 1776, Joseph S. Tiedemann explains how conscientiously residents labored to build a consensus under difficult circumstances. New Yorkers acted the way they did not because they were mostly loyalist or because a few patrician conservatives were able to stem the tide of revolution but because the population of their city was so heterogeneous that consensus was not easily achieved.Differences within the city's pluralistic population slowed the process of hammering out a course of action acceptable to the large majority. The consensus that finally emerged had to be cautious rather than militant in order to unite as many people as possible behind the revolutionary banner. Ultimately, the time it took was far less significant, Tiedemann notes, than the fact that New York proceeded to declare independence, and went on to become a pivotal state in the new nation. In framing his argument, Tiedemann explains the limitations of interpretations offered by both progressive, New Left, and consensus historians. Citing the work of scholars as diverse as Walter Laqueur, Theda Skocpol, and Louis Kreisberg, Tiedemann pays close attention to the dynamics of British colonial rule and its impact on New York.

This book sets the Glorious Revolution in its full British, European and American context, and to show how fundamentally our picture of the English Revolution, as well as of the Revolutionary process of 1688-91, is now being transformed.

Interdisciplinary interpretations of the Revolution and of the late Stuart and early Hanoverian world.

Describes the influence of Britain's Glorious Revolution of 1688 and 1689 on America's founding fathers, detailing the impact of the era on the evolution of representative government and the concept of individual liberty.

In 1688 the Catholic James II was removed from the throne and replaced by the Protestant monarchs William III and Mary. The importance of this "glorious revolution," long seen as a crucial shift in Britain from absolutism to constitutional monarchy, has recently been questioned by historians. This wide-ranging book takes a fresh look at the people and events of 1688. Challenging recent work and arguing that 1688 did see a decisive, though not inevitable, movement toward mixed, constitutional monarchy, Speck provides a vivid picture of politics and society in the Glorious Revolution. He explores the nature of the late Stuart monarchy, and its likely development without the "accident" of James II; the personality of James himself, and the significance of his flight; the nature of the conspiracy to invite William of Orange to England and place him on the throne; and the Revolution's constitutional importance and long-term social and religious implications.

Looking at the physical environments of cities as political catalysts, Carp contends that what began as interaction, negotiation, conflict, and compromise in churches, taverns, wharves, and city streets developed into a wider political awareness and collaborative political action.