Teachable Primary Sources: Oliver Parker’s Recipe for Revolution
When I was preparing to teach a course on the American Revolution last spring, I wanted to ask students to build an interpretation of the revolution’s causes. But I kept coming back to the same problem: most of my assignment ideas seemed to implicitly encourage them to focus on a single cause for the revolution.
Historians know better than to attribute any major event, like the American Revolution, to a single cause. While we can argue about the correct mix of factors—republican ideologies, economic incentives, efforts to protect slavery and white supremacy, demand for Native land, cultural changes, etc.—no serious scholar would claim that the revolution had a single cause and that nothing else mattered. The past is too rich and nuanced for that.
For that reason, a question like “What caused the American Revolution?” is an impossible one to answer in a brief essay. Asking students to answer some version of that question with evidence would be asking them to ignore most of what they had just learned. A good essay exhibits clarity, and nuance is challenging to clearly convey in just a few pages. When I thought about how I would answer some of the prompts I was considering, I realized that I was setting students a nearly impossible task.
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Jordan E. Taylor 
