ABSTRACT
The historiographical debate over how radical the American Revolution was is an old one, and there is no end in sight. On one side stand neo-progressive and Marxian historians, who suggest that the imperial divorce from Great Britain was just that, a break with a colonial power, but that social change at home was modest at best. Compared to other revolutions in the modern world, which dramatically reordered society, the American Revolution, they suggest, was a tame affair, which left class, racial, and gender relations relatively intact. Heads rolled in Paris, and years later, the monarch perished in Russia, but George Washington finished the war as he had begun it: a wealthy planter whose prosperity derived from land speculation and the unpaid sweat of his numerous bondpeople.
