I’m happy to announce that my senior thesis, “A Man in Time of War”: How Colonial Boys Became American Men, 1765–1775, is for sale on the Amazon Kindle store.

It’s my attempt to come to terms with a demographic fact about the American Revolution: more than half the population was less than 16 years old. This has interesting implications for the generational story of the Revolution, and I attempt to trace the impact of the imperial crisis and the Revolutionary War on young people in Boston and New York. On paper it’s about 45 pages long, not counting footnotes, and if I may editorialize I think it gets more interesting as you go. A version with more typos than this one received high honors from the faculty at UC Berkeley, in the nation’s highest-ranked history department.

You don’t need an actual Kindle to read it; Amazon provides free reader applications for Macs, PCs, and mobile devices.

My thanks go out to the many people who discussed this topic with me and to the 10 or 12 who have read draft or complete versions of the paper. If I ever cornered you to talk about “Pope’s Day,” or the Tea Party, or how Andrew Jackson got his scars, know that it was in the service of this project. Most of all I must thank Professors Mark Peterson and Robin Einhorn, the two brilliant and generous teachers who invited me to write this paper as part of their graduate seminar in American history.

Links

• The Kindle ebook is available for $2.99 here.
• I’m working on a way to sell unrestricted PDF copies too.
• The slides from a brief presentation I made to the 2011 thesis colloquium are available on SlideShare. Sadly, no record of the talk itself survives.

Excerpt

Children and teenagers, especially those from hard-working families, did not usually make any deliberate record of their thoughts. There was little institutional or cultural encouragement to do so, and little incentive to preserve any documents they did create. Most of the sources that tell us about the political experiences of young people in this period, therefore, fall into one of three categories: contemporary accounts by relatively wealthy children with free time and education; memoirs and reminisces of youth from older people; and contemporary records of what children and teenagers actually did. This latter category is probably most important in explaining the politics of youth, because even illiterate minors were eager to “vote” with their fists and feet. In doing so, they made an impact in late colonial society without breaching the ivory tower of the Founding Fathers.

The topic of urban violence in American history is fraught with political and ideological implications for any historian who takes it up. A resurgence in professional interest in popular history in the 1950s is commonly attributed to the student radicalism and civil rights movements of the period. The attitude of historians in the early twentieth century toward Samuel Adams and his contemporaries as propagandists, as manipulators of media, was admittedly linked to a widespread perception of nationalist propaganda as the dark side of an emerging mass media. In the twenty-first century, as we experience the impact of worldwide connectivity and electronic social media on politics, it is becoming ever more popular to examine the organization and motivation of crowds and mobs in terms of social networks, information science, and communications technology. The content of historical work cannot be fully isolated from its context, and so it is no surprise that the historiography of mob or crowd action has shifted to favor it as ideas of political propriety have changed in the two centuries since the American Revolution. One recently published book, for example, laments the “taming of the American crowd,” and looks back fondly on the colonial period as a time when citizens were “far more ready than we to act collectively.”

In 1765, when political culture in Boston and New York began to incorporate the threat of popular violence as a legitimate form of partisan expression, not everyone was eager for the change. “Class consciousness” in the Marxist sense would not emerge in either place until the mid-nineteenth century, but society was divided into visible and distinct (if fluid) categories: slaves, the poor, laborers, the “middling sort,” and the wealthy. It was widely understood that political and social deference was due to a community’s prosperous members, clergy, and appointed officials. Moreover, no one under the age of twenty-one was expected to have a formal political voice in any way, let alone a vote. When unpopular policies from London threatened the economic interests and political goals of Bostonians in 1765, the town’s middling artisans and merchants and its laboring “mechanicks,” including the sons and apprentices of each group, formed a radical coalition that upset this status quo and essentially created a new town government. In New York, the Sons of Liberty constituted a new political faction of their own, countering the existing De Lanceyites and Livingstonites. Harnessing the sheer demographic power of city youths was an essential tactic for radical agitators in Boston and New York. Ten years before the “shot heard round the world” at Lexington, boys and young men in the colonial cities were drawn into a traumatic political struggle with long-lasting consequences…