sample essays of IELTS

20 The Historical Significance of American Revolution

The ways of history are so intricate and the motivations of human
actions so complex that it is always hazardous to attempt to represent
events covering a number of years, a multiplicity of persons, and
distant localities as the expression of one intellectual or social
movement; yet the historical process which culminated in the ascent of
Thomas Jefferson to the presidency can be regarded as the outstanding
example not only of the birth of a new way of life but of nationalism as
a new way of life. The American Revolution represents the link between
the seventeenth century, in which modern England became conscious of
itself, and the awakening of modern Europe at the end of the eighteenth
century. It may seem strange that the march of history should have had
to cross the Atlantic Ocean, but only in the North American colonies
could a struggle for civic liberty lead also to the foundation of a new
nation. Here, in the popular rising against a tyrannical government,
the fruits were more than the securing of a freer constitution. They
included the growth of a nation born in liberty by the will of the
people, not from the roots of common descent, a geographic entity, or
the ambitions of king or dynasty. With the American nation, for the
first time, a nation was born, not in the dim past of history but before
the eyes of the whole world.