This is CBS Eye on the World. Here's John Batchler.

It's a great pleasure to welcome Professor Joseph Ellis. His new book is The Cause,

The American Revolution, and its discontent, critical. 1773 to 1783.

Professor, congratulations and good evening. I go immediately to your title because it requires much explanation.

Who called what we now see the revolution, The Cause, and why did they call it The Cause? Good evening to you.

Good evening, team. The cause is what the American colonists began to use as a term to describe their opposition to British policy

in the late, the mid-1770s. Nobody called it The American Revolution at that time, or even until at the end of the war.

The British called it The American Rebellion, and originally the phrase was the common cause.

It was a term that the 12 other colonies used to describe their willingness to support Massachusetts.

My Massachusetts was occupied by the British Army in the wake of the Tea Party and what's called the coercive acts as a way of punishing that particular colony.

Once you get to the summer of 1976, the common cause becomes simply The Cause.

I see it as a kind of verbal canopy over a variety of interest groups. New England doesn't think the same way as Virginia.

There are different religious groups, and there's fundamental difference on the issue of slavery.

And so it's a way of gathering people into the same tent, and what they have in common, The Cause, in its simplest form, is hostility to British policy and then a desire to succeed from the British Empire claim its own independence.

It comes to mean more things, as I think you're going to ask me about, early on in the game, it begins to have radical meaning.

So what we have here is a war for colonial independence that has and begins to have a revolutionary agenda attached to it.

There are fresh faces in your telling people who have been at the margins of my understanding of the war until now.

John Dickinson, Nathaniel Green, John Jay and Robert Morris. I celebrate John Jay, but we must go immediately to someone who's extremely famous and a major player in The Cause.

That would be George III.

George III assumes his office is thrown in 1763. However, by 1773, he has a very strong opinion of his empire and how he wants it to be regarded by rival empires like France and Spain.

George III is a Hanoverian. He is the first, as you say, of the German princes who was raised in Britain and spoke English easily.

However, he has a vision of himself as a very powerful man built on something that is revelatory to me.

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