Congress & the Confederation

This series includes a representative selection of the most interesting and influential journal articles on revolutionary and early national America. The essays in these volumes show that the revolutionary era was an extraordinarily complex “moment” when the broad outlines of national history first emerged. Yet if the “common cause” brought Americans together, it also drove them apart: the Revolution, historians agree, was as much a civil war as a war of national liberation. And, given the distinctive colonial histories of the original members of the American Union, it is not surprising that the war had profoundly different effects in different parts of the country. This series has been designed to reveal the multiplicity of these experiences in a period of radical political and social change.