What were the goals and outcome of the American revolution, and would you say it was a radical or conservative event?

Some, such as historian Howard Zinn, would argue, as he does in his A People's History of the United States, that the American evolution was a conservation enterprise spearheaded by wealthy white males who wanted to increase their own money and power now that they had no use of Great Britain. (This would be after Britain had won the French and Indian War, which rid the colonists of immediate external threats.) The revolution also didn't address the issue of slavery for all its talk of freedom and equality.
All of the above may be true, but in thinking about the revolution within the context of the eighteenth century, I would argue it was a highly radical event. The revolutionaries, though they came from the upper classes, envisioned a fundamentally, at the root (ie radically), a different kind of government than those found in Europe. The idea of a republic, in which people elect a government from the ground up, though ordinary to us, was a radical concept at the time. It flew in the face of the long-lasting conservative idea that government was top down and enshrined in a divine chain of being; traditional thinking held that God appointed a king, and power then radiated through the aristocracy, while the common people were meant to be obedient to those "above" them with little say in their governance. The Founding Fathers rejected this (at least for white males).
George Washington refused to be made a king, and the U.S. Constitution forbids royal or aristocratic hereditary titles, such as duke or earl. The Founding Fathers were serious about implementing a new vision of government that was more democratic and inclusive than what Europe had attempted, one that they understood was a daring experiment that could fail and needed to be handled with care and integrity. We can only hope, some 250 years later, that we maintain that vision.