The American Revolution

To this essay was awarded the Pulitzer Prize of “for the best book of the year in United States history,’ an honor which, strangely, has not often come to the professor of history in our colleges and universities. The book does not need the stamp of this approval: the scholarly fame of its author will insure for it the serious consideration of students of this much-investigated period of our history. Whatever disagreements the findings of this volume may provoke, none will deny that the constitutional problem did exist, or will admit that this problem has heretofore been adequately considered. Recent interpretations of the causes and conditions of the revolutionary period have given us much of its economic, the social, and political phases of the controversy, with conclusions that have been growing less and less pleasing to hereditary-patriotic societies and which offer little comfort to others who would like to believe that at least some right was on the side of the “patriots.”