One of the most outstanding exponents of this point of view, George Bancroft, set forth his thesis in his ten-volume History of the United States. In the nineteenth century, Americans wanted a national historian who would tell the epic story of the Revolution in patriotic terms. Bancroft fulfilled Americans’ longing.

One group, the imperial school, believed that constitutional and political issues brought on

Robert E. Brown challenged the Progressive thesis that the Revolution was a class conflict over the question of who should rule at home. Brown stated that the majority of adult males in Massachusetts were farmers with the necessary qualifications for voting. Middle class democracy in Massachusetts existed, and the purpose of the Revolution was to preserve that democratic social order.

The imperial school of historians was headed by George L. Beer, Charles M. Andrews, and Lawrence H. Gipson. They set the Revolution in the broader context of the history of the British Empire as a whole. The imperial historians concluded that Britain’s colonial policies were not as unjust as Bancroft had stated. Beer claimed that the colonists prospered under a liberal and enlightened system. Andrews saw benefits and burdens in Britain’s Navigation Acts because of the protection for America’s goods and ships. Gipson stated the British were justified in taxing Americans and making the Navigation Acts more strict in 1763. All three historians believed that constitutional issues lay at the bottom of the dispute.

A third challenge to the neo-conservative interpretation came from the historians who studied the Loyalists. The neo-conservatives could not fit the Loyalists comfortably within their interpretation. The third trend took place as scholars explored the nature of the Revolution in psychological terms. They suggested the Americans may have been caught up in a serious identity crisis as a people on the eve of a Revolution.

The Progressive historians emphasized the growing economic split caused by the competition between the colonies and mother country. Carl L. Becker, Charles A. Beard, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr., and J. Franklin Jameson put stress upon class conflict in colonial America in part because they waw their own era in terms of an unending struggle by the people to free themselves from the shackles of the large corporate monopolies and trusts.

A new group of scholars, the neo-conservative school of historians, challenged the interpretation of the Progressive historians. They believed that American society was essentially democratic in the colonial period. The common

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