The Guadalajara Reporter

‘Radicalizing’ the US Revolution

English colonists in America were ruled — and protected — by an accumulation of laws set down in (and between) the Magna Carta, 1215, and the British Bill of Rights, 1689.

That’s what the best educated of these early colonists believed. But it didn’t turn out that way. Someone, in discussing Gordon Wood’s enlightening and Pulitzer Prize-winning book “The Radicalization of the American Revolution,” recently characterized the “English adventure” in that part of the New World that would become the United States as being similar, though not nearly as bad, as setting out to colonize an area and depending on the graces of the present United States Congress for sound-minded support, aid and navigational assistance.

Wood — eccentrically, it once seemed to some — has concentrated his career since the 1960s on a previously ignored period of U.S. history, 1760-1828. Even today, most Americans know very little about the nation-changing era following the triumph of the Colonies’ Revolution over England. Up until “The Radicalization of the American Revolution,” the risky revolt by colonists against the world’s best trained military was perceived as a “conservative” uprising.

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