FROM BARNES & NOBLE EDITORS
The War for Independence was the longest and most disruptive conflict in American history, yet many popular histories speak of it as a struggle in which Americans spoke with one voice. In this radical reexamination of the Revolutionary decades, historian Gary B. Nash emphasizes the diversity of identities and opinions that forged the new Republic. Instead of presenting only the Founding Fathers, he describes a contentious crew of would-be republicans: "millennialist preachers, enslaved Africans, frontier mystics, dockside tars, privates in Washington's army, mixed-blood Indians, ascetic Quakers, disgruntled women." A breakthrough history in the tradition of Howard Zinn and Ron Chernow.

FROM THE PUBLISHER
"The Unknown American Revolution plunges us into the swirl of ideology, grievance, outrage, and hope that animated the Revolutionary decades. It tells of the efforts of a wide variety of men and women who stepped forward amidst a discouraging, debilitating, but ultimately successful war to inscribe on the clean slate their ideas for the kind of America they hoped would emerge from the blood-soaked eight-year conflict. Millennialist preachers and enslaved Africans, frontier mystics and dockside tars, disgruntled women and aggrieved Indians - all had their own fierce vision of what an independent America could and should be. According to Nash, the American Revolution was truly a people's revolution, a civil war at home as well as an armed insurrection against colonial control." The goal was to set a new course for the new country, one free of entrenched class hostilities, religious bigotry, racism, and conventions about gender roles. The people so vividly portrayed in this book did not all agree or succeed, but during the exhilarating and messy years of this country's birth, they laid down ideas that have become part of our inheritance and ideals toward which we still strive today.

FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
The history of the American Revolution that most of us have absorbed is but "a fable," writes UCLA historian Nash. In this insightful, challenging "antidote to historical amnesia," Nash (Race and Revolution) deftly illustrates that while the Revolution has been implanted in our collective memory as the idealized "Glorious Cause," in reality it was more a chaotic and bloody civil war, replete with fragile alliances, a multitude of fronts and clashing cultures. He especially succeeds in detailing the crucial role and often overlooked plight of Native Americans, adding the obscure names of men such as Cornplanter, Dragging Canoe and Mohawk chief Joseph Brant, who allied the Iroquois nation with the British, to the pantheon of the Revolution's players. By 1789 Washington was forced to commit a third of his army to destroying the Iroquois, explicitly ordering that their villages "not be merely overrun but destroyed." Of course, Native Americans who remained neutral or fought alongside the Americans fared no better later at the hands of settlers. Tightly though densely written, this expertly researched tome shakes the "stainless steel" history of the American Revolution to its core. (June 27) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal
Nash (history, UCLA; Red, White and Black) examines the American Revolution from the perspective of the ordinary people involved, e.g., women, laborers, farmers, Native Americans, and slaves, making the case that those who actually fought and won the Revolution deserve the credit for it. As Nash reveals, the clean, linear history of the Revolution taught in school simply is not true; it was actually a very messy, chaotic, and fragmented affair. The narrative focuses on the latter half of the 18th century, examining the revolutionary activities of common people, from the New Jersey farmers asserting their property rights in the 1740s to the plight of African Americans after the war. He debunks many myths of the Revolution, such as that of the citizen soldier (most soldiers were in fact poor and landless immigrants) and unearths many lesser-known facts (e.g., in 1776, New Jersey's constitution implicitly gave women the right to vote-until the legislature narrowed suffrage in 1807). Well written, thought-provoking, and controversial, this complement to Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States is essential reading for anyone with an interest in the founding of the country. Recommended for all libraries.-Robert Flatley, Kutztown Univ. Lib., PA Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.