Past and Prologue : Politics and Memory in the American Revolution

Michael D Hattem
 9780300234961
0-300-23496-1

In Past and Prologue, Michael Hattem shows how colonists changing understandings of history shaped the politics of the American Revolution and the origins of American national identity. Between the 1760s.

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and 1800s, Americans stopped thinking of the British past as their own history and created a new historical tradition that would form the foundation for what subsequent generations would think of as American history. This change was a crucial part of the cultural transformation at the heart of the Revolution by which colonists went from thinking of themselves as British subjects to thinking of themselves as American citizens. Rather than liberating Americans from the pastas many historians have arguedthe Revolution actually made the past matter more than ever. Past and Prologue shows how the process of reinterpreting the past and creating a new historical tradition played a critical role in the founding of the nation.