"A Time of Freewheeling Debate"

"The editors assert bluntly that the gentry who signed the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution 'opposed popular democracy and social equality. . . . They did not hold fundamental values that we accept as common currency today.' The book’s goal, they explain, is to help Americans 'grasp the full scope of the American Revolution' by taking “seriously its most progressive participants' and incorporating 'them into our national narrative.'
"Have they succeeded? In large part, yes."

Mary Beth Norton in The New York Times reviews Revolutionary Founders: Rebels, Radicals, and Reformers in the Making of the Nation, edited by Alfred F. Young, Gary B. Nash, and Ray Raphael.