The Debate on the American Revolution set out unashamedly to examine the American side of the story. It was a choice consciously made and reflected the limitations imposed on a book of this size by so large a topic and herein lies the irony, for at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, a 'new' British history has taken shape, one reconceptualised within an Atlantic world, and latterly an imperial one. Yet the history of the American Revolution has taken a curious turn. When John Adams raised the question of who would write the history of the American Revolution, he was concerned about his own reputation and fearful that Franklin and Jefferson would run away with the glory. The problem that confronts the modern historian of the Revolution is how to incorporate the vast array of actors who participated in it into a single narrative.

Challenges to the preoccupation of historians with republicanism as the prevailing ideology of the Revolution were relatively slow to appear. The relationship between slavery and representation was far too complex to be 'understood in a simple North–South frame of reference'. While not rejecting it outright, Paul Finkelman believed that it was weakened by the lack of debate in Congress about the prohibition of slavery in the 1787 Northwest Ordinance and the absence of comments in members' correspondence. Original Meanings addressed 'the politics of constitution making and the major problems of constitutional theory and institutional design that Americans had to consider when they replaced the Articles of Confederation with a true national government'; and sought to 'evaluate how much authority original meaning" or "original intention" or "understanding" should enjoy in its ongoing interpretation.'"

Any attempt to review the historiography of the American Revolution over more than two centuries is by any estimate presumptuous, foolhardy and overly ambitious, especially when undertaken by a Welsh-born, English and American trained historian who has the privilege of teaching early American history in what was once termed 'one of the dark corners of the land'. The author examines the historiography of the Revolution's causes and meaning, dividing them roughly into the period before and after professionalization. He explores the consequences of the Revolution as they related to the creation of the Federal Constitution, dividing these chapters into a consideration of those writing before the end of the Second World War and those writing in the post-war period taking the subject up to and including the debate over 'original intent'.

The first historians of the American Revolution spoke to different audiences on each side of the Atlantic but Gordon attempted to speak to both. The value of Ramsay's History of the American Revolution lay not in its information, but 'the ways in which he reveals the sensibility through which the events of his era were filtered'. The History of the American Revolution was not Ramsay's first attempt to write a history of his time. It was the passage of the Stamp Act and the 'insignificant duty' on tea that precipitated though did not cause the American Revolution. The origins of that 'great event' were to be found in 'powerful and efficient causes' deep in America's past. The united sentiments of two to three million people spread over a continent in opposition to the Stamp Act 'were not the work of a day or a year'.

Within a framework which tied acceptance of the Federal Constitution to the growth and prosperity of the United States, a commonplace of early histories of the young republic, Curtis constructed an argument based on counterfactual propositions in which enslaved 'Africans', though denied the equal rights of man, became the means of extending rights to others. In two very influential books, The Articles of Confederation and The New Nation Jensen anchored the period between the Declaration of Independence and the making of the Federal Constitution firmly in the progressive tradition. The Articles of Confederation, wrote Jensen, could only be understood 'in relation to the internal revolution in the American states: the individual and group interests, the social cleavages, and the interstate conflicts that existed at the outbreak of the Revolution'.

In the work of nineteenth-century historians women sank further into obscurity, with the singular exception of the writings of Elizabeth Ellet (1818–1877). Bancroft and Hildreth contented themselves with retelling the stories of the deaths of Jane McCrea and Hannah Caldwell. Modern women's history has its roots in the new social history and upheavals of the 1960s when old barriers came down, fresh vistas opened up, and the affinity of the social sciences with history was recognized. The rate of female literacy remained stagnant while that of men forged ahead. John Shy, one of the first of the new military historians, considered that the Americans were disadvantaged by the fact that they had fewer female support staff than the British, but Washington thought there were too many and that they put a strain on scarce resources.

If the vantage point of the imperialists was Whitehall and Westminster rather than the Atlantic seaboard, the inspiration of progressive historians was Paris and the French Revolution. Writing at the beginning of the twentieth century, the original progressives, Beard, Becker, Hacker and Jameson constituted one element of a broad reform movement during the Progressive Era in the years before the First World War. Closely concerned with the Revolution than the imperialists, the progressives sought the origins of the Revolution in internal conflict. They saw the Revolution as a social movement, broadly democratic, and viewed the Federal Constitution as a conservative reaction against it. Progressive historians introduced into American history the language of class and section but not of 'race'. This chapter examines their approach to the Revolution. Instead of creating a new order of benevolence and selflessness, enlightened republicanism was breeding social competitiveness and individualism.

As colonial resistance gave way to armed struggle, Native Americans, living along an extensive frontier stretching over 1,500 miles, were courted assiduously by the British and their American opponents. The chronology of the Indians' revolution only partially overlapped with that of European colonists. The adoption of the term 'borderland' to describe the region emerges relatively late in the book which, beginning with a description of the regional environment, traces the establishment of the Indian population, the development of intercultural trade between Indians and colonists, the emergence of the colonial economy, the destruction of existing valley communities during the revolutionary war and the creation of the post-war economy. The ability of Native Americans and colonists to live and deal with each other in pre-revolutionary America is one of the major themes of much of the new work.

At the time of the Revolution, African Americans, nearly all of them slaves, numbered approximately twenty per cent of the population, a larger proportion than at any time before or since. Insofar as African Americans were discussed at all by the revolutionary generation of historians, it was as a consequence of their status as enslaved workers on southern plantations where they constituted a potential danger to the rest of the population. Resistance was not random but calculated to exploit those times when whites were at a disadvantage such as during epidemics, war and natural disasters and the political conflict with Britain presented further opportunities. When the Revolution came, the existence of slavery among European Americans struggling for their own freedom was an embarrassment to some, an opportunity for others and inconsequential to most.