Human Dimensions of Nation Making: Essays on Colonial and Revolutionary America

    This collection of original essays about the early years of the American experience has been prepared to honor Professor Merrill Jensen, who has tirelessly served his craft of history in distinguished fashion during a long and admirable career, both as a publishing scholar and as a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin.
    Each of the essays stands as an individual entity and advances historical knowledge.  Two introductory pieces serve to place Merrill Jensen among his peers and evaluate the impact of his scholarship on dominant historical themes.  Eleven other research essays touch on issues as various as the characteristics of imperial administrators in British North America during the colonial years, the role of courts in facilitating the outbreak of the American Revolution, the impact of sectional forces on Revolutionary politics, and the failure to provide for an effective militia system in post-revolutionary America.
    Prepared by Merrill Jensen’s former students, the essays represent a rich mixture of topical, methodological and analytical concerns.  Through the years Professor Jensen has encouraged such diversity.  Setting his students to reading primary sources, he taught them that fresh insights would result from naked exposure to the sources.  Through his own writing, he demonstrated to them and to others that human relationships were complex and, above all else, that human beings rather than mindless forces were at the heart of the many dimensions of history.  It is in this spirit that these essays have been prepared and presented to a foremost scholar of the era of the American Revolution.

Distributed for the Wisconsin Historical Society Press