Did the 13 mainland colonies of British North America become America before their inhabitants thought of themselves as Americans? That is the question raised by these two books. Each is a work of scholarly synthesis; each deals rather uneasily with the epochal event - the Revolution - that separates their respective periods; each is finally concerned with the onset of modernity in the world's 'first new nation', as Seymour Martin Lipset described the United States.

LRB 5 April 2001 | PDF Download