EXEMPLARINESS AND THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

Abstract

Devising liberty: preserving and creating freedom in the new American republic. Edited by David Thomas Konig. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995. Pp. xiv+383. £35.00. ISBN 0-804-72536-5

Benjamin Lincoln and the American revolution. By David B. Mattern. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995. Pp. xii+307. $39.95. ISBN 1-570-03068-5

The devious Dr. Franklin, colonial agent. Benjamin Franklin's years in London. By David T. Morgan. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1996. Pp. xii+273. $34.95. ISBN 0-865-54525-1

General Richard Montgomery and the American revolution: from redcoat to rebel. By Hal T. Shelton. New York: New York University Press, 1994. Pp. xiv+245. $45.00. ISBN 0-814-77975-1

The role of instructive, heroic, and exemplary themes in accounts of great national events has a complex history of its own. American independence and its aftermath provide rich examples. Ever since the events themselves, conventional and popular accounts have either featured individuals as heroes or role models, or dwelt on the struggle for values such as liberty and democracy. These traditions became so deeply rooted in patterns of discourse that academic historians have never been able to avoid engaging with them. Countless studies have embodied or responded to some kind of patriotic or hagiographic purpose, and such concerns to different degrees underlie the works under discussion here. The ‘new’ cultural history, however, has sparked a fresh interest in the ‘exemplary’ as a cultural construction in itself, and an increasing number of scholars are engaged in tracing the creation of image and identity, reputation and memory. All the works here touch on this concern, too, though they fall short of embracing the new agenda fully. Taken together, they illustrate the instability of what might be called the ‘traditional exemplary’: certainty that a historical episode or figure can illustrate an ideal principle or characteristic.