Overview

This is a story of rumour, charity, vengeance, and restraint. ""American Insurgents, American Patriots"" reminds us that revolutions are violent events. They provoke passion and rage, a willingness to use violence to achieve political ends, a deep sense of betrayal, and a strong religious conviction that God expects an oppressed people to defend their rights. The American Revolution was no exception. A few celebrated figures in the Continental Congress do not make for a revolution. It requires tens of thousands of ordinary men and women willing to sacrifice, kill, and be killed. Breen not only tells the history of these ordinary Americans but, drawing upon a wealth of rarely seen documents, restores their primacy to America's road to independence. Mobilizing two years before the Declaration of Independence, American insurgents in all thirteen colonies concluded that resistance to British oppression required organized violence against the state. They channeled popular rage through elected committees of safety and observation, which before 1776 were the heart of American resistance. ""American Insurgents, American Patriots"" is the stunning account of their insurgency, without which there would have been no independent republic as we know it.

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9780809075881

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Breen elegantly demonstrates how much we miss when our histories are focused principally on the Founding Fathers. --Nicholas Guyatt, The Times Literary Supplement Generation after generation, students are taught that the Founders inspired a hesitant, though hardy, American populace to reclaim its rights . . . The truth is a good deal messier and more interesting. Historians in our own time--Mr. Breen, Gary B. Nash and Gordon S. Wood, among others--have shifted the emphasis to the common people. -- Alan Pell Crawford, The Wall Street Journal Founding Father John Adams, looking back at the heady and trying days of the American Revolution, famously wrote 'the Revolution was effected before the war commenced.' T. H. Breen's new history sets out to fill in the detail -- showing that by the time embattled farmers 'fired the shot heard round the world' in Concord in 1775, the battle had already been joined by tens of thousands of colonials . . . Breen's book shows an energetic and ne

Breen elegantly demonstrates how much we miss when our histories are focused principally on the Founding Fathers. --Nicholas Guyatt, The Times Literary Supplement Generation after generation, students are taught that the Founders inspired a hesitant, though hardy, American populace to reclaim its rights . . . The truth is a good deal messier and more interesting. Historians in our own time--Mr. Breen, Gary B. Nash and Gordon S. Wood, among others--have shifted the emphasis to the common people. -- Alan Pell Crawford, The Wall Street Journal Founding Father John Adams, looking back at the heady and trying days of the American Revolution, famously wrote 'the Revolution was effected before the war commenced.' T. H. Breen's new history sets out to fill in the detail -- showing that by the time embattled farmers 'fired the shot heard round the world' in Concord in 1775, the battle had already been joined by tens of thousands of colonials . . . Breen's book shows an energetic and necessarily untidy process of invention on the part of a people, and captures well its improvisatory nature. --Art Winslow, Chicago Tribune a scholarly, unnerving account of the American Revolution's darker side--the violence, death threats, false rumors, and extremist rhetoric that introduced a new political order --Caleb Crain, The New Yorker In this compellingly structured and argued book, T.H. Breen asserts that a de facto nation came into existence between the spring and fall of 1774. It was in these crucial months that the people of the thirteen colonies -- not the Founding Fathers, not the Continental Army, not the maladroit British government -- executed a series of steps that collectively solved problems of governance and demonstrated how a republic could be successfully constituted. What's even more surprising is that Breen makes this somewhat counterintuitive argument, one rooted in a social history sensibility, in the form of a chronological narrative. He achi

“Breen elegantly demonstrates how much we miss when our histories are focused principally on the Founding Fathers.” —Nicholas Guyatt, The Times Literary Supplement  “Generation after generation, students are taught that the Founders inspired a hesitant, though hardy, American populace to reclaim its rights . . . The truth is a good deal messier and more interesting. Historians in our own time—Mr. Breen, Gary B. Nash and Gordon S. Wood, among others—have shifted the emphasis to the common people.” — Alan Pell Crawford, The Wall Street Journal  “Founding Father John Adams, looking back at the heady and trying days of the American Revolution, famously wrote ‘the Revolution was effected before the war commenced.’ T. H. Breen’s new history sets out to fill in the detail — showing that by the time embattled farmers ‘fired the shot heard round the world’ in Concord in 1775, the battle had alr

Author Information

T. H. Breen is the William Smith Mason Professor of American History at Northwestern University. The author of several works of history, Breen has also written for ""The New York Times Magazine,"" the ""London Review of Books,"" ""The Times Literary Supplement,"" and ""The New York Times Book Review."" He lives in Evanston, Illinois.

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