Two Views of the American Revolution

As the United States approaches the 250th anniversary of its founding, two works offer valuable, fresh views of the American Revolution. Burns’s 12-hour film sweeps across the long struggle with the command and artistry viewers expect from his earlier treatments of World War II, the Vietnam War, and the American Civil War. Even without photographs, he brings the war alive with clever uses of paintings, maps, reenactments, and the sound of gunfire to hammer home the fighting’s extent and brutality. As always, Burns puts equal focus on people whose voices are not generally heard in such histories, illuminating what motivated Native Americans, enslaved people, women, and ordinary soldiers to support or oppose the rebellion. The film’s central thesis is that the Revolution was not “something that unified Americans” but a true “civil war.” The split between Loyalists and Patriots is well known. The divide between enslavers and the enslaved, and between colonists and Native Americans, is not. In large numbers, both of the latter believed British leaders’ promises of a better future under their rule. Understanding that the Revolution had losers beyond the British only deepens the American origin story. 

Like Burns, Bell pays ample attention to the nameless, the powerless, and the unknown in this lively history. His larger purpose is to reveal that the American Revolution was a “world war in all but name.” France, the Netherlands, and Spain provided the weapons, supplies, and, most important, the cash and credit essential to the American uprising. They also took the opportunity to launch direct military action to weaken the British Empire in North America, the Caribbean, and as far away as India. Global trade patterns were disrupted. Naval clashes spread from the Atlantic and the Caribbean to the Gulf of Mexico, the Mediterranean, and the English Channel. For its part, Great Britain recruited tens of thousands of German and Irish troops to fight on American soil. Even after the revolution ended, its impact persisted, prompting other insurgencies against imperial rule and leading Great Britain and Spain to tighten control over their remaining colonies. In all, Bell comes close to justifying Thomas Jefferson’s description of the Declaration of Independence as an instrument “pregnant with . . . the fate of the world.”