The Seeds of Revolution, Explained

A review of Mary Beth Norton’s “1774: The Long Year of Revolution”

Growing up, I was full of American exceptionalism and just knew that the American Revolution was the most important moment in world history. It didn’t matter the evidence behind it, I just knew. Then I became a little more educated and thought it was the most overrated event in world history. That’s what you do when you’re young and you learn things: you go in the complete opposite direction and everyone else is dumb. But now, I’ve begun to see that while it may not be the most important moment in world history, it is a major turning point and I’m convinced that it deserves every bit of attention that it gets.

The American Revolution is a singular moment in world history for many reasons. It provided the first fully democratic, sovereign nation since ancient Greece (debatably). It created the current most powerful government in the world in the United States. But the most interesting and unique aspect of the American Revolution in my mind is that it created the first modern nation built on communal ideas rather than shared ethnicity. It is these ideas (and the spread of them) that forms the core of the United States as a nation and separates in from the world (even today, in some ways).

This is the heart of Mary Beth Norton’s 1774: The Long Year of Revolution. For the entirety of the text, the focus is on the ideas of the revolution, the principles at stake. How people disagreed, and why, will sometimes surprise the reader, as Norton focuses much more on the moderates in the colonies as they fought against their more famous (today, at least) counterparts. The common characters make their necessary appearances, but the reader is introduced to so many more people that were just as important among the voices of the pre-war colonies.

One aspect of Norton’s book that gripped me was the weight given to sources such as pamphlets, letters, and other communication in the colonies, between the colonies, and across the Atlantic. These communications are, of course, staples of the historical genre, but so are diaries. Norton leans significantly into these public communications and away from personal diaries. But this is because of the question she is attempting to answer. If I could attempt to sum it up, her query would be this: How did such a seemingly small set of issues light aflame a revolution that changed the world? The answer is that the American colonies were built on a set of ideas, and those ideas were violated by the British. Of course, not everyone agreed at first, but these communications changed public opinion over the “long year” of 1774. (The long year of 1774 is defined by Norton as the time from the Tea Act in 1773 to Lexington and Concord in 1775.)

My biggest takeaway from 1774 is that Norton gives the most thorough and yet straightforward explanation of the Boston Tea Party that I have ever read. I had heard for years that the Tea Act made tea cheaper for the colonies, but I didn’t understand how a tax on tea would do that and any research that I did on it just confused me more. As Norton explains in full (but I’ll summarize as best I can) the key is that legal tea became cheaper. The colonists had been smuggling tea for a while now to avoid the already-present taxes, so most of the public got their tea illegally. The British wanted to keep the struggling East India Company (EIC) afloat, so they allowed the EIC to trade directly with the colonies and make the EIC price competitive with smuggled tea. The colonists instead saw it as a ruse to force them to pay the tax that they were against on principle (no taxation without representation and all that jazz). So to keep the general public from being forced to buy the new tea and thereby compromise American principles, they threw it overboard.

It is explorations like this that set Norton’s 1774 apart from other similar books. If you don’t already have a foundational knowledge of American history, I may recommend a lighter book to introduce you. (Thomas Kidd’s American History was just combined into one volume and is a great choice.) But if you are ready to jump into a thorough evaluation of the steps from spark to revolutionary fire, I think 1774 will help you appreciate the depth and nuance of the events and ideas that created a nation.

I received an eARC of 1774 courtesy of Knopf Publications and NetGalley, but my opinions are my own.