Michael Hattem, "Past and Prologue: Politics and Memory in the American Revolution" (Yale UP, 2020)

New Books in Revolutionary America · Mar 9, 2021 · 52m

Michael Hattem’s Past and Prologue: Politics and Memory in the American Revolution (Yale, 2020) is a fascinating new look at how eighteenth-century Americans thought about the past. Not merely an academic exercise, history was a catalyst of colonial and early republican identity. This historical consciousness was not, Hattem argues, static—on the contrary, as North Americans went from British subjects to rebels to independent Americans, so too did their attitudes toward the past change.

Hattem roots his analysis in a broad range of evidence spanning from history books to almanacs, newspaper…