![]() This story exists underneath the broader narrative of the American Revolution and its participants, in the footnotes of the historical literature, in the opening chapters of memoirs, in newspaper stories and broadside pamphlets. It is also a story about a collective coming of age. Yet the commonplace story of the American Revolution leaves out a key subplot: it is in many ways the story of a generation. Since the middle of the twentieth century, historians have framed the Revolution most often as a narrative of “the people,” of the ordinary men and women who made a difference without making into the ranks of the “Founding Fathers.” 2 This development in historiography is welcome, and to discuss the emergence of a democratic republic in terms of the people who made it happen on the ground, with actions as well as words, is an indispensable addition to the long-standing narratives about intellectual and political leaders. The story of the Revolution has been told thousands of times in the centuries since it ended, filtered through interpretive frameworks that illuminate specific subplots-often in interesting ways that nevertheless leave out important information. 1 You can read dozens of books about the period-about the politics of taxation, about gender or slavery, about the military events of the war-and not come across this fact. In 1775, at the onset of the American Revolution, the majority of colonial Americans were children under the age of sixteen. Ritual Protests: The Stamp Act and Non-Importation.The Youth Economy in New York and Boston.Esther Forbes, Johnny Tremain (1943) Contents “A boy in time of peace and a man in time of war.” Bessie shook her head, but she wasn’t going to argue any more. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (1918) Ten or twelve years afterwards when these same boys were fighting and falling on all the battle-fields of Virginia and Maryland, wondered whether their education on the Boston Common had taught how to die. One of the commonest boy-games of winter, inherited directly from the eighteenth-century, was a game of war on Boston Common… Now and then it asserted itself as education more roughly than school ever did. One might fear it, but no one honestly despised it. Blackguardism came constantly under boys’ eyes, and had the charm of force and freedom and superiority to culture or decency.
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