[ l68 ] BOOK BEVIEWS overview of the eighteenth century by comparing the course and meaning of the Enlightenment in Europe and America, suggesting that in the New World, unlike the Old, there was no serious discrepancy between rhetoric and reality. Caroline Robbins, whose work on English radicalism stimulated the recent flurry of investigations into the intellectual origins of the Revolution, sharpens the focus by masterfully surveying the nature of European republicanism during the century and a half prior to 1776. Against this broad ideational background, Richard L. Bushman turns to Massachusetts to detail one of the central tenets of republicanism, virtue (courage and public spirit), by examining notions of its opposite, corruption, and relating such attitudes in the provincial era to the Revolutionary concern with illicit influence, avarice, and venality. Whether this excellent analysis of attitudes toward government and authority in the most politically sophisticated colony has applicability elsewhere in America remains to be seen. Turning to the pre-Revolutionary decade, Pauline Maier demonstrates how the specific actions of king and Parliament in conjunction with the experience derived from popularly based resistance serves as a catalyst to convert colonials from royalists to republicans. The volume concludes appropriately with a penetrating reexamination of loyalist ideology by Mary Beth Norton, who argues convincingly that the independence movement was not a struggle between Whigs and Tories but rather an intramural contest between Whigs of differing political persuasions. Together these two collections of original essays underscore the necessity of continually asking new questions of familiar material in order to comprehend more fully the American Revolution. Yet the ability to provide answers to historical conundrums depends on the availability of information; after nearly two centuries there are still surprising lacunae in Revolutionary historiography. If the thoughts and deeds of the Founding Fathers are now common knowledge, the attitudes and actions of the so-called inarticulate masses on whose shoulders the fate of the rebellion rested have been neglected. If the convolutions of the "American mind" have been studied systematically, the relationship between ideas and behavior remains obscure. If the roles played by Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia in the Revolutionary drama have been examined in detail, the crucial contributions of the remaining cast of nine have been generally slighted. Our knowledge of the social and economic dimensions of Revolutionary America remains elementary and fragmentary; the war itself (aside from campaigns and battles) is one of the most neglected aspects of the Revolution; the seventeen British colonies in the New World that had the audacity not to commit regicide in 1776 have been cast into oblivion, and the import of the Revolution for what Robert R. Palmer has called "the Age of Democratic Revolution" has received scant attention. And still largely ignored is John Adaw's admonition that the principal task confronting the student