Stories of Independence: Identity, Ideology, and History in Eighteenth-Century America

Peter C. Messer demonstrates that a strong sense of a shared past transformed British subjects into American citizens. He traces the emergence of distinctively American attitudes about society, politics, and government through the written history of the American experience. Stories of Independence argues that the way early Americans wrote about their own history—from colonial times, to the heady days of the Revolution, to the uneasy decades following independence—helped shape the future of…