Аннотация:OR a quarter century historians of the American Revolution have F been wrestling with one dominant issue: the establishment and stabilization of the American republic. Their great achievement has been to show that in both conceptualization and conduct the public life of the early United States differed strikingly from the colonial regime. The transition was sharp, disruptive, and difficult. The notion that the Revolutionaries managed to glide insensibly (in John Adams's prescriptive phrase) from the old order to the new is now simply untenable.1 Two separate lines of inquiry have led to this scholarly achievement, one line running through political language, the other through political experience. There have been hot debates. But a point comes when it is useless to argue some questions further. We have reached that point: from current scholarship it seems indisputable that the successful Revolutionaries did find themselves thinking with new minds, seeing with new eyes, and hearing with new ears (to paraphrase the South Carolinian David
