Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation Study Guide

Modern Americans broadly share a sense that members of the revolutionary generation of the 1770s-90s brought about something pre-ordained by the gods: a nation marked by popular government and a market economy. Some of those leaders, indeed, spoke prophetically, but the fact was that they also knew their movement could have failed and they would surely have hanged together as traitors. Had the British army commanders prosecuted the war more vigorously, they could have nipped the uprising in the bud, and evolution rather than revolution would have kept the colonies within the Empire. (read more)