The American Revolution
Reading: For primary sources, Chapter 5 from Brown, Victoria, B. and Timothy J. Shannon. Going to the Source, Volume I: To 1877. Available from: VitalSource Bookshelf, (5th Edition). Macmillan Higher Education, 2019, linked earlier in the module.
For background, American Yawp, Chapter 5, Sections III-IV – this covers a lot of ground, so focus on the forms of protests – and Section VI – what social groups saw improvements in their status as a result of the revolution?
Problem: The authors provide the text of several revolutionary-era songs in order to examine the connections between social celebrations and political culture in the colonies. This is meant to help students consider how the authors of such songs incorporated political purpose into social situations, and how the social situations where people sang could change politics.
Method: Read the songs last. Read everything but the songs themselves first; the reading in Yawp, all the introductory material before the songs, and the “Analyzing the Songs” and “The Rest of the Story” sections after the songs, too.
This material explains the context of celebration in which these songs were used, suggests the advantages and disadvantages of employing such texts, and they even provide a model of how to analyze the lyrics of one. You do not have to fill out or submit the Source Analysis Table, but you won’t be able to write a good paper unless you could answer the questions asked in the table.
Paper Topic: Write a paper around 500 words answering the following question, adapted from the “Analyzing Songs” section in the reading: What individuals or groups were marked as outsiders or exiles from the body politic in these sources?
Do you see any evidence here of how these songs might have been used by those who wrote, published, and sung them to intimidate or coerce the reluctant or neutral into supporting a particular cause?