No misnomer

Gentleman in wigs and satin knee-britches composing philosophical tracts - the Founding Fathers (and their equally quaintly bedecked spouses) little resemble the 20th-century image of revolutionaries: Lenin atop a cannon rallying the sailors at Kronstadt, or Mao in peasant garb haranguing the troops on the Long March. But the American Revolution was no misnomer. It irreparably shattered the twin pillars of tradition: monarchical authority and hereditary privilege; it revivified an ancient experiment in democracy, conferring political form on a fractious people; and it loosened the bonds of society, giving free rein to acquisitive, religious, and reforming energies. More than its topographical constituents - mountains and farmlands, forests and towns - the new nation was an amalgam of ideas, extracted from classical Greece and Rome, from the Old and New Testaments, from peasant culture and Enlightenment philosophy, fused in the heat of war and invasion, and then poured, white hot, over much of North America, whose borders it eventually overspilled.

- from Mapping America's Past, pg. 60