What Made American Revolution Different?

The stirring and ominous term “revolution” conjures the lurid image of an established order violently overthrown. In the post-Enlightenment era, it is the French Revolution that first comes to mind, from the fall of the Bastille through the reign of terror. A similar sort of political spectacle, both bloody and cruel, played out in Russia and China in the 20th century. The American Revolution, though, seems to follow a separate pattern. In “The Will of the People,” T.H. Breen, a distinguished historian of colonial America, looks closely at the struggle for American independence and asks what made the American revolutionary experience so different.