I like thinking about the people who misbehaved in the 1700s. As a teenager, I was initially drawn to journalism as a medium for telling stories, but in college, I was entranced by the stories I could tell with early American sources. Years ago, Jan Lewis noted that many readers want “bedtime stories” about how great the American Revolution was, but there’s much more to the Revolution’s history. Now, I’m a history professor at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City of New York. Having lived in the Boston area and New York City, it’s been a thrill to write books about the American Revolution in both places.
I wrote
The Great New York Fire of 1776: A Lost Story of the American Revolution
This book made me want to dedicate my life to studying the American Revolution.
Alfred F. Young tells the story of George Robert Twelves Hewes, a poor, diminutive shoemaker who was at the Boston Massacre and the Boston Tea Party. He also touched off a riot that led to a man being tarred and feathered. Hewes spent his whole life as a poor man, but he briefly became a celebrity in his old age. Young uses this fleeting moment of fame to explore how Americans sanitized and distorted the memory of the American Revolution.
This book inspired me to study the American Revolution in the cities, and the forgotten, sometimes violent ways that radicals pushed for greater equality.
George Robert Twelves Hewes, a Boston shoemaker who participated in such key events of the American Revolution as the Boston Massacre and the Tea Party, might have been lost to history if not for his longevity and the historical mood of the 1830's. When the Tea Party became a leading symbol of the Revolutionary ear fifty years after the actual event, this 'common man' in his nineties was 'discovered' and celebrated in Boston as a national hero. Young pieces together this extraordinary tale, adding new insights about the role that individual and collective memory play in shaping our understanding of…
This book opened my eyes to indigenous Americans’ experience of the Revolutionary War. Heavy on detail, it’s not for the faint of heart. Each chapter focuses on one North American community at a time, from various spots on the map, and shows the many different ways that Native people responded to the upheavals of the American Revolution.
Calloway went on to write several other great books, and other authors have since expanded our understanding of Native peoples’ history, but this was my first, and it’s a great place to start.
This study presents a broad coverage of Indian experiences in the American Revolution rather than Indian participation as allies or enemies of contending parties. Colin Calloway focuses on eight Indian communities as he explores how the Revolution often translated into war among Indians and their own struggles for independence. Drawing on British, American, Canadian and Spanish records, Calloway shows how Native Americans pursued different strategies, endured a variety of experiences, but were bequeathed a common legacy as result of the Revolution.
I couldn’t put down the story of Isabel, a fictional Black teenager who lived through the American Revolution in New York City.
The book covers everything from the assassination plot against George Washington to the fire that burned much of the city in September 1776, along with the everyday injustices of eighteenth-century slavery. The book gives the reader a true feel for the Black experience in Revolutionary New York.
Each chapter starts with an excerpt from a real Revolutionary document. It’s geared at young adult readers, but this is not your grandmother’s Johnny Tremain. I loved this book and the remainder of the trilogy that followed it.
Isabel and her sister, Ruth, are slaves. Sold from one owner to the next, they arrive in New York as the Americans are fighting for their independence, and the English are struggling to maintain control. Soon Isabel is struggling too. Struggling to keep herself and her sister safe in a world in which they have no control. With a rare and compelling voice, this haunting novel tells not only the story of a remarkable girl and her incredible strength, but also of a time and place in which slavery was the order of the day and lives were valued like…
I went into this book cold, knowing nothing about it beforehand, and it left a powerful, thrilling impression. I almost don’t want to say anything else about it so that other readers can experience the same suspense.
Readers might know Anderson from Feed or his other quirky genre-bending books. This book, the first of two volumes, is a work of historical fiction set mostly in Boston. It uses eighteenth-century language to tell an epic tale about the American Revolution, the Enlightenment, and the dark side of both.
It’s a book of horror (perhaps even anticipating the movie Get Out), with intricate details that will delight a certain kind of reader.
Anderson’s imaginative and highly intelligent exploration of . . . the ambiguous history of America’s origins will leave readers impatient for the sequel. — The New York Times Book Review
Young Octavian is being raised by a group of rational philosophers known only by numbers — but it is only after he opens a forbidden door that learns the hideous nature of their experiments, and his own chilling role them. Set in Revolutionary Boston, M. T. Anderson’s mesmerizing novel takes place at a time when Patriots battled to win liberty while African slaves were entreated to risk their lives for…
I’ve been assigning this book to students for a few years now, introducing them to the ways that Americans dueled with one another over slaveholding and Black citizenship.
In 1779, British privateers attacked a few South Carolina plantations and took thirty-four enslaved people away (or maybe they went willingly in search of freedom). After a series of adventures, the men and women arrived in Revolutionary Massachusetts, and their enslavers wanted them back. The resulting dispute foreshadowed the debate over slavery that hides in the heart of the United States Constitution.
Because it’s not too long, I think this book is a great way to introduce students to slavery in the North and South. Blanck shows how Black people pushed back against the compromises that tried to box them in.
Tyrannicide uses a captivating narrative to unpack the experiences of slavery and slave law in South Carolina and Massachusetts during the Revolutionary Era. In 1779, during the midst of the American Revolution, thirty-four South Carolina slaves escaped aboard a British privateer and survived several naval battles until the Massachusetts brig Tyrannicide led them to Massachusetts. Over the next four years, the slaves became the center of a legal dispute between the two states. The case affected slave law and highlighted the profound differences between how the "terrible institution" was practiced in the North and the South, in ways that would…
New York City was the most important place in North America in 1776. That summer, an unruly rebel army under George Washington repeatedly threatened to burn the city rather than let the British take it. Shortly after the Crown’s forces took New York City, much of it mysteriously burned to the ground. For years, historians have said they still aren’t sure what happened.
This is the first book to fully explore the Great Fire of 1776 and why its origins remained a mystery even after the British investigated it in 1776 and 1783. Uncovering stories of espionage, terror, and radicalism, I paint a vivid picture of the chaos, passions, and unresolved tragedies that defined the Revolutionary War.
I come by my interest in history and the years before, during, and after the Second World War honestly. For one thing, both my father and my father-in-law served as pilots in the war, my father a P-38 pilot in North Africa and my father-in-law a B-17 bomber pilot in England. Their histories connect me with a period I think we can still almost reach with our fingertips and one that has had a momentous impact on our lives today. I have taken that interest and passion to discover and write true life stories of the war—focusing on the untold and unheard stories often of the “Average Joe.”
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on any other single day of the war.
The narrative of No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident while focusing its attention on ordinary individuals—clerks, radio operators, cooks, sailors, machinist mates, riflemen, and pilots and their air crews. All were men who chose to serve their country and soon found themselves in a terrifying and otherworldly place.
No Average Day reveals the vastness of the war as it reaches past the beaches in…
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, or on June 6, 1944, when the Allies stormed the beaches of Normandy, or on any other single day of the war. In its telling of the events of October 24, No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident. The book begins with Army Private First-Class Paul Miller's pre-dawn demise in the Sendai #6B Japanese prisoner of war camp. It concludes with the death…
