"The American Revolution" by Gordon S. Wood

The emergence of this rambunctious middling democracy was the most significant consequence of the American Revolution. The origins of the Revolution necessarily lie deep in America's past. A century and a half of dynamic development in the British continental colonies of the New World had fundamentally transformed inherited European institutions and customary patterns of life and had left many colonists believing that they were seriously deviating from the cultivated norms of European life. Americans Resistance …

…put it, the Revolution was not only about home rule; it was also about who should rule at home. It was now seen as anything but a contest over ideas. This denigration of ideas and emphasis on class and sectional conflict dominated history-writing during the first half of the twentieth century. Then in the mid century a new generation of Historians rediscovered the constitutional and conservative character of the Revolution to new heights of sophistication.