Book Review: A New Age Now Begins (Volume One) by Page Smith

A New Age Now Begins: A People's History of the American Revolution, Vol. 1 by Page Smith
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The American Revolution began long before 1775, in fact the British colonists were technically rebelling in 1765 however during that decade the ‘American’ consciousness began. A New Age Now Begins: A People’s History of the American Revolution (Volume One) is the first of two books by Page Smith covering American Revolution as well as his American history series, A People’s History, in which he reveals how British colonists transformed into Americans.

Smith just doesn’t deal with the American Revolution with the immediate lead up but goes into the origins of each of the 13 colonies and their development in broad terms both internally but in relation to each other before 1763. The period between 1763 to the outbreak of armed conflict in 1775 covers a little over a third of the book as the British Parliament and colonists butted heads over taxes that brought the once selfish colonies closer together and the populace went from thinking of themselves as British to something new, Americans. The military phase of the Revolution takes up just under half of the rest of the volume and through just after the Trenton-Princeton campaign, but with several political developments like how the new states developed constitutions that would have implications later. This volume ends at page 872—with Volume Two continuing the page count—throughout which is a lot of information, but one of critiques I had was that there were no footnotes or bibliography until I glanced at Volume Two in which Page addressed the lack of footnotes—extending the length of an already large history, finding them personally pretentious, and including the sources within the text when quoting or revealing what an individual thought—and while an answer to my main critique, there is still a little doubt that affects my overall view of this very interesting history.

A New Age Now Begins (Volume One) is the first of a double volume history of the American Revolution with this dealing with the founding of colonies through the darkest hour of a young nation.

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