Writing any history of the Revolutionary War and its effects on national identity requires entering into a conversation layered with some of the most powerful and enduring narratives and interpretative frameworks of the historical profession. It also means acknowledging recent Native American histories and challenges from Atlantic World and African Diaspora studies that assert alternatives to the understanding of our national origins. Liam Riordan, in his work Many Identities, One Nation: The Revolution and Its Legacy in the Mid-Atlantic, acknowledges these challenges and his relationship to a third category of analysis: the parochial context of community studies that often is overlooked in favor of a more national scope. With these predominate narratives in mind, he argues that everyday life in three towns along the Delaware River from 1770 to 1830 reveals that the nation was composed of local struggles over power that held religion, popular sovereignty, ethnicity, and gender in uneasy tension. Overshadowing such local contests, however, were efforts of trans-regional political and religious organizations through which respectable, white, Protestantism came to present itself as normal, with special claims to being American by the 1820s. Riordan draws illustrative sources from personal correspondence, local newspapers, church bulletins, and census information. He uses several local personalities as examples of how individuals navigated local political and religious environments and he clearly demonstrates the religious culture in these towns. Choosing 1770-1830 allows Riordan a nuanced analysis of how colonial parochialism managed the urgency required by the Revolution as well as the nation-building and millennial movements that followed.

7. The author of the passage would probably consider which of the following to be most similar to the challenges in red lines?

A) A group of laborers in a factory who go on strike in order to try to negotiate better working conditions.
B) A dissident who questions his church’s doctrine about whether women should be allowed to be priests in the church.
C) A document found in a tomb giving a contradictory account to the established record of a battle in the Civil War.
D) A Native American who stages a protest in order to try to change restrictive reservation laws.
E) A scientist who, after careful experimentation, puts forward a paper that debunks current wisdom regarding Atlantic Ocean pollution concentrations.


8. Select the sentence in the passage in which the author puts forward an assertion that supersedes one of her previous assertions.





9. In the context in which it appears, “parochial” most nearly means

A) limited
B) unclear
C) religious
D) historical
E) partisan