Abstract
The historiography concerning the American Revolution has been peculiarly rich and contradictory with respect to the main sources and causes of this two-decade complex process that led loyal Englishmen to brutally and irrevocably break with their mother-country. Older interpretations about the origins, the effects and the very nature of the Revolution, were classically based on the tenet that far from constituting a real rupture with the British politics and domination, the revolutionary movement was to a great extent conservative. It was meant to protect the colonists' rights against the British oppressive interferences and threatening purposes, rather than to overthrow the structures of society. This is the thesis of the great historian of the Revolution, Jack Greene, when he contends that any theory that emphasizes the importance of the Revolution as a decisive phase in the creation of the American nation and the construction of the American national identity "seriously underestimates the powerful continuities between the colonial and the national eras and thereby significantly overestimates the revolutionary character of the revolution".
