A People’s History of the American Revolution

How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence

Ray Raphael

• Publisher: The New Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781565846531
• eBook ISBN: 9781595588517
• Edition: 0
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

The best single-volume history of the Revolution I have read.
—Howard Zinn

The first major effort to tell the history of the American Revolution from the often overlooked standpoints of its everyday participants, A People’s History of the American Revolution is a highly accessible narrative of the wartime experience that brings in the stories of previously marginalized voices: the common people, slave and free, who made up the majority in eighteenth-century America.

This first volume in The New Press People’s History Series skillfully weaves diaries, personal letters, and other long-overlooked primary source material into the historical narrative. The result is a remarkable first-person perspective on the events leading up to and during the war. With a simple shift of the focus of history’s lens—away from Revolutionary leaders such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and on to the slaves they owned, the Indians they displaced, and the men and boys who did the fighting—author Ray Raphael brings us a true people’s history of the Revolutionary experience.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Preface by Howard Zinn
• Introduction
• 1. Rank-and-File Rebels
• 2. Fighting Men and Boys
• 3. Women
• 4. Loyalists and Pacifists
• 5. Native Americans
• 6. African Americans
• 7. The Body of the People
• Notes
• Index