Admittedly I still haven’t actually read Lepore’s book, but I’ve been exposed to her arguments through some of my academic friends and, maybe I’m predisposed to the romantic version, but Linebaugh & Rediker’s framework in The Many Headed Hydra just seems more natural. Maybe it smacks a wee bit of historical revisionism to play up a grand Irish/Black/Spanish alliance of revolutionaries in 1740s Manhattan. But lensing the event through the witch hunt rings of elitist liberal pessimism and a deliberate desire to draw entirely antagonistic racial lines through the climate of the American Revolution so that the modern trendy anti-American leftist can more safely dismiss the Revolution as a bourgeoisie and reactionary affair. White reformism feeding off of a unenlightened darkie revolt (we dare not call it radicalism) is a stupid bias and is based in a modern model of racial identity and social structure. Eh… I mean, she’s probably right in many senses. I just can’t help feeling that Linebaugh & Rediker’s crowd are more right.
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