Contested Commonwealths: Essays in American History

Pencak’s essays do not conform to standard interpretations of the revolutionary era that stress the importance of republican ideology or socio-economic conflict. Rather, he looks at colonial experiences of the French and Indian War as definitive in shaping dislike of Britain. He stresses that the popular thought expressed in songs and almanacs portray America as an open society, a land of plenty, threatened by British restrictions rather than a land where ancient Roman virtue or traditional British liberties flourished.

Moving to the early republic, Pencak looks at Shays’s Rebellion from the point of view of those who suppressed it, and finds that they were genuinely concerned that Massachusetts’s newly-formed republic was threatened by westerners. Westerners who presented themselves as an army and sought to restructure a constitution formed only six years before. George Washington was, in effect, the chief executive of the new nation from 1775 to 1797 and borrowed heavily from his wartime experiences to shape his presidency.