Liberty Is Sweet
The Hidden History of the American Revolution
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- £18.99
Publisher Description
A “deeply researched and bracing retelling” (Annette Gordon-Reed, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian) of the American Revolution, showing how the Founders were influenced by overlooked Americans—women, Native Americans, African Americans, and religious dissenters.
Using more than a thousand eyewitness records, Liberty Is Sweet is a “spirited account” (Gordon S. Wood, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Radicalism of the American Revolution) that explores countless connections between the Patriots of 1776 and other Americans whose passion for freedom often brought them into conflict with the Founding Fathers. “It is all one story,” prizewinning historian Woody Holton writes.
Holton describes the origins and crucial battles of the Revolution from Lexington and Concord to the British surrender at Yorktown, always focusing on marginalized Americans—enslaved Africans and African Americans, Native Americans, women, and dissenters—and on overlooked factors such as weather, North America’s unique geography, chance, misperception, attempts to manipulate public opinion, and (most of all) disease. Thousands of enslaved Americans exploited the chaos of war to obtain their own freedom, while others were given away as enlistment bounties to whites. Women provided material support for the troops, sewing clothes for soldiers and in some cases taking part in the fighting. Both sides courted native people and mimicked their tactics.
Liberty Is Sweet is a “must-read book for understanding the founding of our nation” (Walter Isaacson, author of Benjamin Franklin), from its origins on the frontiers and in the Atlantic ports to the creation of the Constitution. Offering surprises at every turn—for example, Holton makes a convincing case that Britain never had a chance of winning the war—this majestic history revivifies a story we thought we already knew.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bancroft Prize winner Holton (Abigail Adams) spotlights in this sweeping history the role "women, Native Americans, African Americans, and other unknown Americans" played in the Revolutionary era. Covering the 1750s to the 1790s, Holton examines relatively obscure episodes, including the 1755 Battle of Monongahela in the French and Indian War, which helped shape George Washington's tactics as commander of the Continental Army and exacerbated tensions between the colonists and Indigenous Americans. Pushing back against accounts that prioritize the Stamp Acts, Holton argues that by 1765, "free colonists" had come to believe that "Parliament had already subverted their vital interests to those of British sugar planters hoping to corner the molasses market, Native Americans trying to defend their land, and British merchants bent on bleeding them dry." Holton also profiles lesser-known individuals, including Louis Cook, who served as "the highest-ranking Native American in the Continental officer corps—and its only African American." Examining the consequences of the Revolution, Holton shows that many of the "modest gains" of "ordinary freemen" were erased by the Constitution, and argues that other marginalized groups suffered "more misery than freedom." Skillfully probing the Revolution's ambiguities and inconsistencies, this richly detailed, multidimensional history casts America's founding in a revealing new light. Illus.
