Guy Chet__Articles of Confederation -- why do historians disagree?

US History textbooks provide a view of colonial and Revolutionary history from the perspective of the early-national period. Looking back at the Revolution from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they paint the Revolution as a product of long incremental cultural change in America; a process by which uniquely American circumstances – ethnic diversity, slavery, economic and demographic dynamism, and other effects of expanding frontiers – produced uniquely American traits in the colonists. This process of Americanization gradually differentiated and alienated Americans from their compatriots and government across the Atlantic.
Specialists on the colonial era, by contrast, are generally more skeptical regarding Americanization and the alleged cultural divide between provincials and Britons; they are more likely to see the Atlantic as a cultural bridge than a barrier. Colonialists thus tend to view the Revolution as an event that reflected the settlers' English identity and beliefs, rather than as the national event it became retrospectively, in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Within this framework, the Revolution emerges as not as a tax revolt or war for national liberation, but as a constitutional crisis, in which rebels saw themselves not as advocates for change, but as reversing the clock to restore the old order.