The American Revolution is one of the most significant events in American and world history. This event turned American society into a nation. It also transformed a monarchical society into a republic in which individuals were citizens and actors in the political process. In the long term, its significance and importance to the American people cannot be overestimated.
Still, in the post-war period, life for many Americans did not change overnight. Only when the Constitution was ratified more than ten years later did the new nation’s democratic ideas begin to be put into reality (Thompson & Bradley, 2019).
When the Revolution ended, the country’s rights and democratic framework had only started to shift. Sometime after the victory of the Americans, political and public life changed significantly. As more individuals got the right to vote, political involvement rose. Furthermore, ordinary people had an expanding role in municipal and state governance.
In fact, for many Americans, life after the war was no different from life before the war. Jobs, economic status, political privileges, or prohibitions have mostly stayed the same even after several years of growing victory.
However, the values and laws that have been accepted have enabled people to take full responsibility for their well-being, acting individually for their affairs and collectively for the public interest. Over time, it was this freedom of communities, together with individualism, that helped in the struggle for equal rights and the abolition of slavery and continues to this day to help achieve equality in modern society.
The American Revolution managed to lead not to the replacement of one form of power by another, preserving, in essence, the old order, but to change the very structure of society. In other countries, this process began later and was characterized by violent, bloody uprisings and slow metamorphoses.
This feature made the American Revolution revolutionary and made it possible to claim that it started a new order. The end of the Revolution was characterized by a political transition and the birth of a fundamentally new nation founded on democratic values.
References
Ellis J. J. (2021). The cause: The American Revolution and its discontents. Liveright Publishing.
Thompson, C. Bradley. (2019). America’s Revolutionary mind: A moral history of the American Revolution and the declaration that defined it. Encounter Books.