155-1-700
AMERICANS remember their revolution as an event both epochal and clean. Richard Nixon famously argued that it was not a revolution at all. Some historians, such as Charles and Mary Beard and Howard Zinn, stress its conservative character others, like Gordon Wood, have insisted on its radicalism. The revolution Thomas Allen presents, in an original and copiously sourced history of the war’s losers, the Loyalists, called Tories by their victorious opponents, is very different.
Mr Allen sees it as “a revolution that was also a civil war”. Men fought to the death, he says, “American against American, kin against kin”. At the decisive fight at King’s Mountain, there was only one British subject. “Everyone else was an American, and those who chose to fight for King George III had chosen the wrong side.”
History is written by the victors. Mr Allen points out that although Loyalists were a minority—in the end perhaps no more than one-fifth of the colonists—in many places they were a very substantial proportion of the population of the colonies. In the end, some 80,000 quit the new republic for Britain, the British colonies in the Caribbean and especially for Canada, where their influence has been lasting. One tragic group were the black freedmen, in danger of being re-enslaved on the orders of George Washington. (At least one of them had belonged to Thomas Jefferson.) They were eventually allowed to emigrate to Nova Scotia, but were so badly treated there that they moved on to West Africa, where they became Sierra Leone’s elite, founding the capital, Freetown.
A. 어휘
civil war 內亂(내란). epochal 시대의, 劃期的(획기적)인.
conservative 보수적인. radicalism 急進主義(급진주의).
present 제공하다, 나타내다. copious 풍부한.
original and copiously sourced history 독창적이고 자료가 풍부하게 제시된 역사.
the Loyalists 왕당파. Tories 영국파(미국 독립전쟁 당시 영국에 가담한 자).
opponents 대항자, 반대자. subject 백성.
substantial 多大(다대)한, 사실상의, 실질적인. emigrate 타국으로 이주하다.
the capital 首都(수도). Nova Scotia 캐나다 남동부의 반도.
155. The king's shilling ①
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