WRITING CAREER

Raphael’s first work, An Everyday History of Somewhere (1974), won the Commonwealth Club award for the best book of the year about California.

Subsequent books focused on themes relevant to his adoptive home in Northwest California: Edges: Human Ecology of the Country (1976, 1986); Tree Talk: The People and Politics of Timber (1981, revised and expanded in 1994); and Cash Crop (1985), an inside look into a budding marijuana industry that was transforming the local economy and culture. These works surveyed broad social and economic themes by highlighting the personal accounts of diverse individuals. Spurred by raising two sons, Ray utilized this strategy in The Men from the Boys: Rites-of-Passage in Male America (1989).

Starting in 1996, with a grant from the National Council of Humanities, Ray adapted this approach to the American Revolution. His widely acclaimed A People’s History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence (2001) broadened history’s lens to include those not often present in tales of our nation’s founding.

The First American Revolution: Before Lexington and Concord (2002) led to marked rethinking about the Revolutionary War’s beginnings. In response to the Boston Tea Party, Parliament not only shut down the port of Boston but also revoked the Massachusetts Charter of 1691, which had granted the people considerable say in their government. Their sacred rights withdrawn, the populace rose up as a body and rebelled. Everywhere except Boston, where British troops were stationed, they shut down county courts, which administered British authority, executive as well as judicial, on the local level. To fill the vacuum, they formed a Provincial Congress that levied taxes, gathered weaponry, and raised an army to resist the Crown’s attempt to recapture a province it had just lost. The Spirit of ’74: How the American Revolution Began (2015, co-authored with Ray’s wife Marie) contextualized this little-known story. By framing the grassroots overthrow of British rule in Massachusetts within two iconic events—the Boston Tea Party in December of 1773 and the British march on Lexington and Concord sixteen months later—Ray and Marie demonstrate, step-by-step, how the Massachusetts Revolution of 1774 evolved into the American Revolution of 1775.

Why is the first transfer of political and military authority never featured, and rarely even mentioned, in our national narrative? Who is the gatekeeper for stories we tell? Founding Myths: Stories that Hide our Patriotic Past (2004) explores the intriguing intersection between history-making and story-making, detailing how and why our most cherished tales were invented in the nineteenth century and asking the critical question: why do we continue to tell them now? By deconstructing thirteen stories such as Paul Revere’s Ride, the “Shot Heard Round the World,” the winter at Valley Forge, and “Give me liberty or give me death,” Raphael shows how distortions that still anchor our core narrative hide a rich history that is far more deserving of celebration.

While narrative demands often lead to distortions of history, good history and good stories are not mutually exclusive. Founders: The People Who Brought You a Nation (2009) is a sweeping narrative that starts with unrest in 1761 and ends with the ratification of the Bill of Rights thirty years later. Raphael focuses on seven lead characters, moving back and forth between leading figures “inside chambers” and people “out-of-doors.” These proactive historical agents represent contrasting yet complementary outlooks and ideologies, classes and occupations, and regional interests. Taken together, they form the basis for a more complete and compelling rendition of our nation’s founding than could ever be achieved by focusing on a small, cohesive group of “Founding Fathers.”

In Revolutionary Founders: Rebels, Radicals, and Reformers in the Making of the Nation (2011), Alfred F. Young, Gary B. Nash, and Ray Raphael gather twenty-two original biographical essays from top scholars in the field. As noted historian Eric Foner explains in the afterword, “The essays in Revolutionary Founders go a long way toward illuminating the upsurge of egalitarian sentiment that threw into question not only monarchical rule but inequalities of every sort, making it central to our understanding of that turbulent era. They bring to life a remarkable cast of characters—ordinary Americans who helped to shape the dual struggles for American independence and over what kind of society an independent United States was to be.”

Though the book’s language is accessible to a popular audience and its stories are entertaining, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Founding Fathers and the Birth of Our Nation (2011) delivers deeply researched and up-to-date scholarship. Raphael leads readers on a fast-paced tour of the Founding Era, from the beginnings of Revolutionary unrest in the 1760s through Jefferson’s administration in the early 1800s. He provides historical context for the powers of Congress and the President, judicial review, religion and the state, the second amendment, and other topics that stir interest and argument today.

Addressing the historical context of executive authority, Raphael penned Mr. President: How and Why the Founders Created a Chief Executive (2012). Fearful of monarchical tyranny, the framers sought to create an executive office that would make government more efficient without commandeering power or oppressing citizens. How might they do this? Following the Constitutional Convention’s dynamics, Mr. President reveals how delegates cobbled together a lasting institution. We see the flamboyant, peg-legged Gouverneur Morris use bluster and savvy to bequeath to us his vision of an independent presidency. We follow the expansion of executive authority during the administrations of Washington, Adams, and Jefferson—a trajectory that set in motion an office that is more sweeping, more powerful, and more inherently partisan than the framers ever intended.

To counter the exploitation of casual history for political purposes, Raphael undertook to set the historical record straight in Constitutional Myths (2013). Americans have taken to waving the Constitution in the air and proclaiming, “The founders were on MY side! See, it’s all right here!” But these phantom constitutions bear little relation to the historical one. Before we consider what the framers would do if they were alive today, we need to see what they did in their own time—not in our terms, but theirs. Only then can we begin to resolve the sweeping question: what does the Constitution, written in a different era, mean for us today?

In 2017, Vintage (Penguin/Random House) asked Ray to provide a concise annotation of the Constitution: The U.S. Constitution—Explained, Clause by Clause, for Every American Today.

For the Constitutional Sources Project (ConSource), he developed comprehensive lesson plans, based on classroom simulations, for the Revolutionary War, Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation, Constitutional Convention, and implementing the Constitution in the Early Republic.

Meanwhile, back home, Raphael penned Little White Father: Redick McKee on the California Frontier (1993); Two Peoples, One Place (2007), a comprehensive history of Humboldt County through the 1880s, co-authored with Freeman House; and “I Like It Here”: Life Stories of Humboldt’s Bob McKee (2022). His latest work, A Life in History, places Ray’s own life in historical context—as a Civil Rights and Anti-War activist in the 1960s, a back-to-the-lander in the 1970s and 1980s, and for the past 30 years, a historian focused on broadening and deepening our understanding of the Founding Era.