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The New Oxford History of the United States

The appearance of the first volume of the planned eleven-volume Oxford History of the United States under the general editorship of C. Vann Woodward is a major event in American historiography. Oxford University Press is to be congratulated both on this project and the design (especially the adoption of footrather than endnotes), proof-reading and price of this handsome book. The writing of a large-scale textbook on the period 1763-89 is a daunting task. The author has to keep at least a dozen balls in the air. The temptations to nationalistic bias are legion. This series is aimed both at scholars and the general reading public. Since there are many accomplished jugglers in this field, one cannot but wonder at the choice of an expert on seventeenth-century theological and intellectual history. Robert Middlekauff's first book, Ancients and Axioms, dealt with eighteenth-century education, but he made his reputation with his Bancroft prize-winning, triple biography, The Mathers. He had never previously published research on the Revolution, nor had he contributed to debates over the interpretation of that complex process. There are several commendable aspects to The Glorious Cause. Middlekauff presents his narrative in a lively and always readable style. Many of his setpieces the Stamp Act Riots, Lexington and Concord, Bunker Hill, the siege of Charleston, for instance are models of atmospheric descriptive writing. He does justice to the fighting qualities of the British army in America, which may have lost the war but won most of the battles. His portraiture of Washington is refreshingly free of the adulation often coating that dull but dauntless figure reference to his wartime expense accounts would have uncovered yet more warts. Most welcome is the author's stress on the importance of religion as a galvanizing force before and during the Revolution. Though he does not give adequate weight to Heimert's thesis on evangelical radicalism, nor to the element of Puritan fanaticism in such leaders as Samuel Adams, it is refreshing to see in, for instance, the allusion to Paine's millennialism or Mason's providential explanations, the reintegration of a neglected ingredient of the revolutionary mentality.