About the Author

Rosemarie Zagarri received her PhD from Yale University in 1984. Her most recent book is Women and Politics in the Early American Republic (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). Dr. Zagarri's work focuses on gender and politics during the American Revolution and the early years of the country.

Causes of the American Revolution

Secondary Sources

Berlin, Ira. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. A sweeping examination of the institution of slavery and the lives of enslaved people from early colonization into the 19th century.

Breen, T.H. The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. An important study that examines the ways in which consumer goods brought ordinary men and women into the revolutionary movement.

Morgan, Edmund S. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1975. A classic work that highlights the central contradiction of the American Revolution: freedom for white people and slavery for black people.

Nash, Garry. The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America. New York: Viking Press, 2005. A masterful synthesis that shows the limitations as well as the achievements of the American Revolution, especially for poor white men, women, and enslaved people.

Wood, Gordon S. The Radicalism of the American Revolution. New York: Vintage Books, 1993. A classic work that traces the social and political transformations of American society resulting from the American Revolution.

Young, Alfred F. and Nobles, Gregory H. Whose American Revolution Was It? Historians Interpret the Founding. New York: New York University Press, 2011. An excellent overview that examines changing scholarly views of the American Revolution from the early 20th century to the early 21st century.