By shifting our perspective from national congresses and crucial battles to the affairs of small communities, we expose what has long been a nettlesome question about the character of the American Revolution. What, we may ask, made it revolutionary? In other words, what made it an event that amounted to more than a colonial rebellion? After all, achieving independence was not in itself revolutionary. The argument put forward here is that the Revolution transformed American political culture by allowing large numbers of people who had previously been excluded from politics to come forward, to speak up, and to shape the flow of events. They rejected without second thought aristocratic privilege. Within an eighteenth-century context in which political power revolved around figures claiming authority simply as a result of bloodlines, this was a radical development.
—T.H. Breen, The Will of the People (Introduction: "Revolutionary Voices," page 11)