100 books like The Stamp Act Crisis

Revolutionary historians are familiar with the Townshend Acts, import duties approved by Parliament in 1767 that pushed the Americans closer toward independence. Patrick Griffin explores the man for who the taxes were named—Chancellor of the Exchequer Charles Townshend—but also his brother George who served as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland from 1767 to 1772. By comparing and contrasting these two brothers who ran the British Empire for a brief moment, Griffin invites us to consider the American Revolution within its imperial context. I found the parallels between America where independence efforts succeeded and Ireland where they failed particularly thought-provoking. 

The Boston Massacre: A Family History takes an event that I thought I knew inside and out, an event I teach in my classes, and tells an entirely new story.

The soldiers who shot the protestors in Boston on a wintery day in 1770 are usually the villains—Paul Revere and other Boston revolutionaries labeled the deaths a “massacre,” after all. But by starting a few years earlier, Zabin shows the British soldiers as young men coming to a colonial town that was also, at the time, British.

They lived in colonial houses, made Bostonian friends, and married Bostonian women. So by the time tensions between the protestors and the British government were accelerating into war, it was a community of friends and families that would be torn apart. 

Also key to the coming of the Revolution was the Boston Tea Party of December 16, 1773, when colonists tossed thousands of pounds of tea into the harbor. Benjamin Carp looks at the Tea Act of 1773, which lowered the duty on tea as a means of convincing Americans to agree to taxation without representation. He also traces the affairs of the East India Company in Asia and asks how its priorities affected America. Carp also investigates the protests against the Tea Act (of which the party in Boston was but one), asking how colonial resistance affected American politics. The defiance of the Patriots detailed here is not just a refutation of British imperial rule, but of a corrupt placemen and political inequality. 

The U.S. Constitution is the document that spells out the framework of American government. In contrast, the Declaration is something of a “one and done” document; interesting for historical reasons, but not relevant to modern governance.

And yet…of the two documents, the Declaration of Independence has a stronger hold on American emotions. Both documents have their own holiday, but not many Americans celebrate Constitution Day, which falls on each September 17th, reserving fireworks and outdoor meals for the Fourth of July instead.

Why? According to the late MIT historian Pauline Maier, the Declaration has become a kind of sacred artifact that spells out the nation’s moral beliefs, even if those beliefs boil down to a single sentence about equality, and life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Maier shows us how that transformation occurred. She walks us through many other obscure government documents during the Founding Era to… show more.

Basbanes’ book examines the many uses for paper. 

He takes us along on a visit to papermaking family mills in villages in China and Japan where handmade paper is still produced in quantity, using two-thousand-year-old traditional methods and local plant materials. This is followed by a summary of the development of pulp paper in Asia, Islam, Italy, and Europe including the evolution of paper machines. 

Much of the book is devoted to an extensive coverage of every possible use of paper, including disposable paper, paper cartridges for rifles, artillery wadding, cigarettes, passports, coded messages, hard copy secret documents, government archives, recycled paper, paper money, postage stamps, diaries, letters, artistic designs, music scores, junk mail, construction plans, origami and paper models.

All proof that as someone said, “The paperless society is about as plausible today as the paperless bathroom.”

McCullough documents the great victory of the American Revolutionary War.

Somehow George Washington’s rag-tag army was able to defeat the greatest military power the world had ever seen, the British Army and Navy. It’s our great lesson for the world that coercion does not work. The tyrant King George III failed to defeat freedom in America.

My book examines how these lessons were not applied to the Vietnam War. The key takeaway from a peacebuilding stance is to use the Revolutionary War as an example of the failures of force. Had the British engaged in more effective peacebuilding techniques and negotiated a mutually beneficial relationship with America rather than try to subjugate through force, the war could have been avoided.

Like a brilliant painting, Jeff Shaara’s novel Rise to Rebellion brings to life the major players in the rising conflict between Britain and her American colonies. Colorful description and details help us see King George, ruling far from his colonies alongside ruthless advisers; Royal Governor Thomas Gage, determined to put down the colonists’ uprising; John Adams, industrious lawyer and farmer; Benjamin Franklin, lively inventor and scientist; and George Washington, ambitious Virginian military leader, as they lead in the saga that results in independence for our nation.

There have been a lot of comprehensive histories of the American Revolution published since, but Christopher Ward’s The War of the Revolution is still the gold standard.

Want me to prove it? Pick up a Ferling or Philbrick or any other historian writing about the American Revolution today and see how many times they use it in their work.

Expertly documented, with clean, concise writing that can be read end-to-end or used as a reference for specific campaigns and battles, this is my go-to source for everything American Revolution.  

This is a classic and provocative set of essays by an eminent historian who asked whether and in what ways the War for Independence resembled modern revolutionary wars. It led every serious historian of the Revolution to realize that the war was not simply a conflict between armies but a political struggle to secure the loyalty of the civilian population.

I first read Minutemen and Their World in graduate school, and it shaped how I see the Revolution and history more generally—history is made by the decisions of ordinary people.

First published in 1976 and recently reissued, it focuses on the battles of Lexington and Concord, where the first shots of the Revolution were fired. Like Zabin’s Boston Massacre, it starts before the well-known events. The people of Concord were ordinary men and women with no intention to revolt against their empire. They were busy arguing about local matters such as whether to fire their preacher.

What I love about this book is how we see them gradually become revolutionaries, really against their will, humanizing the Revolution and helping us understand that it was not inevitable.