Editing Thirteen Colonies (section)

==Historiography==
{{further|Historiography of the British Empire}}
The [[first British Empire]] centered on the Thirteen Colonies, which attracted large numbers of settlers from Britain. The "Imperial School" in the 1900–1930s took a favorable view of the benefits of empire, emphasizing its successful economic integration.{{Sfnp|Middlekauff|1966|page=23–45}} The Imperial School included such historians as [[Herbert L. Osgood]], [[George Louis Beer]], [[Charles M. Andrews]], and [[Lawrence Gipson]].<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Shade |first=William G. |date=1969 |title=Lawrence Henry Gipson's Empire: The Critics |url=https://journals.psu.edu/index.php/phj/article/download/23352/23121 |journal=[[Pennsylvania History]] |pages=49–69 |access-date=January 13, 2016 |archive-date=March 28, 2019 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190328045055/https://journals.psu.edu/index.php/phj/article/download/23352/23121 |url-status=dead }}</ref>

The shock of Britain's defeat in 1783 caused a radical revision of British policies on colonialism, thereby producing what historians call the end of the First British Empire, even though Britain still controlled Canada and some islands in the West Indies.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Simms |first=Brendan |title=Three victories and a defeat: the rise and fall of the first British Empire |date=2008}}</ref> [[Ashley Jackson (historian)|Ashley Jackson]] writes:
{{blockquote|The first British Empire was largely destroyed by the loss of the American colonies, followed by a "swing to the east" and the foundation of a [[second British Empire]] based on commercial and territorial expansion in South Asia.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Jackson |first=Ashley |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=uPb_dJyR5C4C&pg=PA72 |title=The British Empire: A Very Short Introduction |year=2013 |isbn=9780199605415 |page=72 |publisher=OUP Oxford |author-link=Ashley Jackson (historian)}}</ref>}}

Much of the historiography concerns the reasons why the Americans rebelled in the 1770s and successfully broke away. Since the 1960s, the mainstream of historiography has emphasized the growth of American consciousness and nationalism and the colonial [[Republicanism in the United States|republican value-system]], in opposition to the aristocratic viewpoint of British leaders.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Tyrrell |first=Ian |year=1999 |title=Making Nations/Making States: American Historians in the Context of Empire |journal=The Journal of American History |volume=86 |issue=3 |pages=1015–1044 |doi=10.2307/2568604 |jstor=2568604}}</ref>

Historians in recent decades have mostly used one of three approaches to analyze the American Revolution:<ref>{{Cite book |last=Winks |title=Historiography |volume=5 |issue=95}}</ref>
* The [[Atlantic history]] view places North American events in a broader context, including the [[French Revolution]] and [[Haitian Revolution]]. It tends to integrate the historiographies of the American Revolution and the British Empire.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Cogliano |first=Francis D. |year=2010 |title=Revisiting the American Revolution |journal=History Compass |volume=8 |issue=8 |pages=951–963 |doi=10.1111/j.1478-0542.2010.00705.x}}</ref><ref>{{Cite book |title=Empire and Nation: The American Revolution in the Atlantic World |date=2005 |editor-last=Gould |editor-first=Eliga H. |editor-last2=Onuf |editor-first2=Peter S.}}</ref>
* The [[new social history]] approach looks at community social structure to find issues that became magnified into colonial cleavages.
* The ideological approach centers on republicanism in the Thirteen Colonies.<ref>Compare: {{Cite book |last1=David Kennedy |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=MJ6aBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA156 |title=American Pageant |last2=Lizabeth Cohen |publisher=Cengage Learning |year=2015 |isbn=9781305537422 |page=156 |quote=[…] the neoprogressives […] have argued that the varying material circumstances of American participants led them to hold distinctive versions of republicanism, giving the Revolution a less unified and more complex ideological underpinning than the idealistic historians had previously suggested.}}</ref> The ideas of republicanism dictated that the United States would have no royalty or aristocracy or national church. They did permit continuation of the British [[common law]], which American lawyers and jurists understood, approved of, and used in their everyday practice. Historians have examined how the rising American legal profession adapted the British common law to incorporate republicanism by selective revision of legal customs and by introducing more choice for courts.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Pearson |first=Ellen Holmes |title=Revising Custom, Embracing Choice: Early American Legal Scholars and the Republicanization of the Common Law |date=2005 |work=Empire and Nation: The American Revolution in the Atlantic World |editor-last=Gould |pages=93–113 |editor-last2=Onuf}}</ref><ref>{{Cite book |last=Chroust |first=Anton-Hermann |title=Rise of the Legal Profession in America |date=1965 |volume=2 |author-link=Anton-Hermann Chroust}}</ref>