From Colonists to Patriots
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution by Bernard Bailyn
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This book has some age on it, and the style may be somewhat ponderous for people accustomed to the less formal style adopted in a lot of current non-fiction. However, it's still a fascinating study of the role of the various pamphleteers in the intellectual history of the American Revolutionary War. The Declaration of Independence did not come out of nowhere. Even as late as the 1760's the colonists were still thinking in the traditional terms of crown, aristocracy and commons (and at the time the term "democracy" was in reference to the commons, paralleling and contrasting to the aristocracy).
But even those pamphleteers had their roots in the pamphleteers of the English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution, which transformed the British monarchy to a much more limited form responsible to Parliament in a way that would've been unthinkable in the time of the Tudors. For instance, most of us know John Milton in terms of Paradise Lost -- but he was in fact a well-known Puritan pamphleteer.
The book includes extensive footnotes and an index.
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