Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 February 2017
What we choose to read from the past matters enormously in how we assess history. Many of the most serious debates about the revolutionary and founding eras of the United States hinge on texts, and if some historians have revised their interpretations of American history it is in no small part due to the reevaluation of the relative importance of one set of writings against another. In the last three decades we have seen many texts move from background to foreground, from Bernard Bailyn's exhaustive study of revolutionary pamphlets which challenged the conventional wisdom that the revolution was an exclusively Lockean enterprise to Pauline Maier's recent look at the Declaration of Independence, situating that document in the context of the many, many declarations of independence put forward before July of 1776 and challenging prevailing assumptions about the intellectual influences on the colonies’ break with England. These endeavors reveal the human touch in historiography because it is always the decision of individual scholars to point our attention to recently discovered or newly reinterpreted texts.
1 Rush, Benjamin “Thoughts upon the Mode of Education Proper in a Republic,“ in Essays on Education in the Early Republic, ed. Rudolph, Frederick (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), 17.Google Scholar
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