"The American Revolution" by Gordon S.Wood

The emergence of this rambunctious middling democracy was the most significant consequence of the American Revolution. The origins of the Revolution necessarily lie deep in America's past. A century and a half of dynamic development in the British continental colonies of the New World had fundamentally transformed inherited European institutions and customary patterns of life and had left many colonists believing that they were seriously deviating from the cultivated norms of European life. …