A well researched and accessible narrative of the many contradictions and inglorious aspects of the Glorious Cause, although I doubt it would comport with the curricular requirements of those fretting over CRT.

I can't give it five stars. If it was five stars, it would not have taken several years to read. This is definitively a book for people who want some dense history. I love American history, and even this was a bit of a slog.
But that is also the credit of this book, Gary Nash did incredible work researching and writing this book. The thesis is that the American Revolution is more than just the War for Independence; it is the belief in equality and democracy and representation that prompted the colonies to declare independence. Not surprisingly, women, Africans in America, First Nations and working men wanted those rights as well. However, the men we associate the most with the Revolution, Washington, Jefferson, et. al, were loathe to follow up on those ideals to their fullest. Wealthy Virginians, among the loudest to call for separation, were also the least likely to take up arms, and worse, least likely to pay taxes to support the soldiers fighting the war.
Throughout the United States, rich men took advantage of laws that confiscated property from veterans, whose families couldn't pay taxes while the men were off fighting a war that they would not get paid to fight.

Read that sentence again.

Of course, worst is the genocidal treatment of First Nations and the cultural genocide of African-Americans (an attempted genocide in Africa). All of these people found Jefferson's writing compelling, but none of them made a compelling case for Jefferson, or Adams or Madison.

With the dark state of politics and society in the US at present, I decided it was time to go back and see where we came from. How did we deal with difficult times in the past. This is the second book in my stack of 10 on American history that I want to read this year. The first book was an outstanding account from the first arrivals in the colonies up to the Revolutionary War. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...
This book takes us from the 1760’s to the end of the war. But it is not a “war story”. Nash writes revisionist history. This is a book about how bad America was at its founding, a fine addition to the execrable 1619 theme. He is quite proud and excited with the movement as many areas of history now being written/rewritten. This book is a collection of accounts reflecting the American revolution from the bottom. The little guy on the pointy end of the spear, the slaves of the North and South, the wives and widows left behind, the Native Americans on both sides of the conflict and those who tried to stay neutral, the militia men and, to a lesser extent, the British and their exploits. There are almost no accounts of fighting, except many accounts of attacks on the Indian tribes. The war itself is in the background but never comes to fore. A major weakness in his book. In this guy’s story the generals and Founding Fathers are basically corrupt, only fighting to acquire riches or property in the west. Nash’s Revolutionary War is a struggle of the lower classes to overthrow the oppressive elites which only partially succeeds. In the end, the patriot elites are not “leveled”, even though the British are defeated.

Why give it 4 Stars? Nash does present a side of the society that is interesting and one you will not get in popular history. I never felt Nash was presenting a fair account but it’s important to know these stories. Nash may be slanted but you can round out your knowledge of the beginning of the US by reading this book along with other books. This is definitely not a one volume reference on the war. In fact, unless you are well acquainted with the Revolutionary War and the American governmental system, natural rights, etc, you will not get much out of this book. It is dense and not exactly riveting. It is a book for Americans.

n  The pages that follow mostly view the American Revolution through the eyes of those not in positions of power and privilege, though the iconic founding fathers are assuredly part of the story. In reality, those in the nether strata of colonial society and those outside “respectable” society were most of the people of revolutionary America. Without their ideas, dreams, and blood sacrifices, the American Revolution would never have occurred, would never have followed the course that we can now comprehend, and would never have reverberated around the world among oppressed people down to the present day. Disinterring these long-forgotten figures from history’s cemetery, along with their aspirations and demands, along with the events and dramatic moments in which they figured so importantly, is offered as an antidote to the art of forgetting. n

Nash cites seven events that were crucial to the road to revolution. The “Regulators” in North Carolina, the efforts of coastal elites to take title to land worked by backwoods farmers, the “Great Awakening”, the impact of the Seven Years’ War as some Indian tribes lost access to French supplies of arms and the reduction of British “gifts” after the war; the fight for voting rights for men without property; the conflict of slavery and abolition are some of the factors.
This book is strong in relating the what the lower classes were doing and thinking. He also gives you plenty to think about. The idea of “freedom” resonates. While the eastern coastal elites wanted freedom from Britain, they also wanted to retain their upper-class life above the “commoners” and riff-raff. The language of freedom had immense impact on the slaves in North and South. The story of how slaves gained freedom or not, went over to the British in great numbers, were rewarded or betrayed for service n  the British were careful not to offend the Loyalist support they so badly needed. When the fleeing slaves of southern Loyalists reached their lines, British commanders regularly returned them to their owners as soon as they discovered the slaves’ identities. In many cases, they sold slaves captured from patriot masters back to the Americans in order to purchase supplies for the army with no qualms of conscience.n The generally tragic impact of the war on the Native American tribes is a major theme throughout. The role of women in society is also well covered, with stories about dealing with inflation and lack of money while trying to raise a family with the man off to war.
The rise of abolition is written about extensively. I was surprised at the extent of slavery in all communities and the Quakers were no exception. It was just a part of the environment. Ben Lay wants a reckoning:
n  Such a man was Benjamin Lay. Born to poor Quakers in England, Lay spent seven years at sea and then a few more in Barbados, where he and his wife witnessed the barbaric conditions of African slavery. Coming to Philadelphia, the hunchbacked, dwarfish Lay was shocked to see fellow Quakers practicing slavery. So began what some called crazed zealotry, but what others admired as an uncompromising display of conscience. Lay was a strict vegetarian, refusing to eat anything provided through the death of an animal. He sometimes lived in a cave on his small farm outside Philadelphia. He and his wife made homespun clothes to avoid materials made by enslaved Africans. He publicly smashed his wife’s teacups to discourage the use of slave-produced sugar. Taking his cause to the quiet Quaker meetings, Lay made himself impossible to ignore. On one occasion, he stood outside a meeting with one bare foot buried in deep snow to dramatize how badly slaves were clothed in winter. He also kidnapped a Quaker child to bring home to Friends the grief suffered by African families when their children were abducted…n

The common people in the colonies were highly engaged in reading newspapers and books…and talking about what they read:
But political awareness and the eagerness to jump into political debate was hardly less pronounced. In New York City in the 1750s, a visiting gentleman described “how common it is to see a shoemaker, tailor, or barber, haranguing with a great deal of warmth on the public affairs.” Askance at this, he complained that the artisans had only “knowledge from the newspapers.” But that in itself was a sign of political maturity. The visitor blinked at how a workingman would “condemn a general, governor, of province with as much assurance as if he were of the [king's] privy council.”

Philadelphia’s ordinary people exhibited the same thirst for political knowledge and the same yen for political debate. “The poorest laborer upon the shore of the Delaware,” declared the Anglican clergyman Jacob Duché “thinks himself entitled to deliver his sentiments in matters of religion of politics with as much freedom as the gentleman or scholar.” ……. “Cringing servility,” observed Duché, was not in style and “such is the prevailing taste for books of every kind that almost every man is a reader; and by pronouncing sentence upon the various publications that come in his way, puts himself upon a level, in point of knowledge, with their several authors,”

Women in early America have their stories told. They are not shrinking violets:
From the earliest waves of immigration, life in frontier North America put a premium on women’s hardiness. In colonial courts, wives gained more control over property they brought into marriage than in England and Ireland. They also enjoyed broader rights to act for and with their husbands in business transactions. Large numbers of women worked alongside their husbands in competent and complementary ways. They had limited career choices and restricted rights, but they also shouldered broad responsibilities. In towns and on farms, daily routines of husband and wife overlapped and intersected far more than today. “She is a very civil woman,” wrote one visitor to the southern colonies, “and shows nothing of ruggedness or immodesty in her carriage; yet she will carry a gun in the woods and kill deer and turkeys, shoot down wild cattle, catch and tie hogs, knock down beeves with an ax, and perform the most manful exercises as well as most men in those parts.” “Deputy husbands” and “yoke mates” were revealing terms used by New Englanders to describe eighteenth-century wives. Women clearly helped shape the world around them,

…gave notice that they were made of oak, not willow. “We the widows of this city,” wrote a group of New York women in 1733, “protest the failure to invite us to court. We are housekeepers, pay our taxes, carry on trade and most of us are she Merchants. ... We have the vanity to think we can be fully as entertaining and make as brave a defense in case of invasion and perhaps not turn tail as soon as some of the men.”

The common soldier (or how the hell did we ever defeat the strongest power on earth?):
For all his obscurity, the foot soldier was, in fact, one of the main reasons that the Americans were able to sustain a series of disheartening defeats in the first two years of the war and still continue the fight. Washington and his generals relied on the poor unsung youth—the guerrilla fighter whose capacity to survive in horrendous conditions proved crucial. Washington understood what would later become a famous dictum of war, one that also applied in Vietnam two centuries after the American Revolution: The standing army that does not win, loses; the guerrilla army that does not lose, wins. Private Joseph Plumb Martin, an out-of-work farm laborer who joined the Eighth Connecticut Regiment, was the kind of young, penniless soldier who made all the difference. In plainspoken but penetrating prose, inscribed in a diary kept through several enlistments, the seventeen-year-old Martin, born in the tiny farming village of Becket in western Massachusetts, showed what the common soldier faced, endured, and—sometimes—survived. “We had nothing to eat for two or three days previous, except what the trees of the fields and forests afforded us,” he wrote in mid-December 1777, as Washington’s army marched along a rutted road from Gulph Mills, on the Schuylkill River west of Philadelphia, to the Valley Forge encampment where they would spend the winter. “But we must now have what Congress said,” Martin recalled, “a sumptuous Thanksgiving to close the year of high living we had now nearly seen brought to a close.” They did not get turkey with all the stuffing and side dishes…

African-Americans played a role in the Revolutionary War that should be celebrated:
n   Boston poet a century later of the muscular Attucks, who had charged the British soldiers with a stout cordwood stick. At Lexington and Concord, Prince Easterbrooks was one of the first wounded patriots. After this, many more black New Englanders joined up, including one of Venture Smith’s sons. Some of them were free but many were slaves, fighting alongside or in place of their masters. White Americans were fighting to protect their liberty; enslaved Americans fought to attain it.

Those who fought as slaves held the hope that their masters would reward them with freedom. Sometimes they were actually promised it. Peter Salem signed up in the village of Framingham with his master’s pledge of granting his freedom. Salem served at Lexington and a few weeks later at Bunker Hill, where he killed Major John Pitcairn of the British marines, who led the attack on the patriots’ fortifications. Salem later fought at Stony Point, Monmouth, and Saratoga, survived the war, and built a cabin in Leicester, Massachusetts. In another case, Salem Poor fought alongside his master, Lieutenant Thomas Grosvenor, at Bunker Hill. So honorable was Poor’s performance that fourteen Massachusetts officers petitioned the Continental Congress to award freedom to this “brave and gallant soldier.” Poor went on to fight with Washington’s army at White Plains, New York, in 1776, and endured the trying winter of 1777-78 at Valley Forge. He became a small property owner after the war. In still another case, Prince Whipple, the slave of a New Hampshire officer, pulled the stroke oar on a small boat carrying George Washington across the Delaware River in a piercing snow and sleet storm on Christmas night in 1776.

Peter Salem, Salem Poor, and Prince Whipple were the kind of men celebrated by William C. Nell, the first African American historian of the black revolutionary experience. Writing in the 1850s, while he worked to integrate Boston’s public schools, Nell hoped to further the abolitionist crusade by pointing to the blood shed by black Americans for the “glorious cause.” Nell Meant to stimulate racial pride while countering the white Negrophobia that had spread rapidly throughout the North in the early nineteenth century. n

One area that is seldom covered is the domestic and financial impact of the war:
n   The War of Independence entered a new military phase as the action moved South in late 1778, as we will see below. But at the same time it entered another phase: A meltdown of the fiscal structure undergirding the war effort....Dislocations in an economy have been endemic to most wartime societies, shortages of essential commodities occur: A gallon of molasses costing 2 shillings in early 1776 cost 20 shillings in early 1778 and 200 hundred shillings at the end of 1779; the price of a bushel of corn rose from 3 shillings in mid-1776 to 100 shillings in April 1779 to 180 shillings in February 1780. n

While the content is nowhere near as unknown as the title implies, this is still a valuable book on American colonial history.

integrates the experiences of women, Africans and African Americans, Native Americans as well as the poor and working classes. The Unknown Revolution is certainly a history from the bottom up but in tackling the topic, Nash also explores the intersection of history writing and public memory while emphasizing the role of power in shaping individuals’ experiences. At the same time, Nash doesn’t ignore celebrated figures and events. Instead he uses them to make one of his most important arguments, freedom for Americans held in bondage was certainly possible as was fairer treatment of native peoples in addition to increased rights for women and the poor.

In this boldly revisionist history, Nash recasts the American Revolution as a populist movement born of private citizens, working-class people and popular sentiment. As a corrective to the elite image of the affair as the business of aristocratic founding philosophers, this notion is a necessary piece of the puzzle and illuminating counter-perspective to history as usual. As a cohesive thesis to a substantive study, I found it a bit lacking. That the Revolution was a broadly populist affair is proven thoroughly and quickly; the implications of this fact are not followed through to much insight. Nash, having handily made his major point, seems content to then sit back and merely relate facts, a weird and jarring shift, given the contrariness of his thesis. It's not that the following evidence contradicts his original thesis, but it fails to develop it beyond a more than obvious and superficial level.

That's a shame, because the impact of this new perspective carries the book, which admittedly needs a little help with its bulky and ponderous narrative. Nash is enthusiastic enough, but he is enthusiastic more about the ideas behind the events, rather than the people behind the events. That means the writing lacks a little humanity and tends to the coldly academic. Not a fatal error to be sure, but one that keeps the story from becoming the epic adventure it could have been.

Still, worth a read for the new angle; an interesting companion read would be Gordon S. Wood's The Radicalism of the American Revolution.

Insightful history from the eyes of the people. Unfortunately does not carry through with this POV into his conclusion and can be hard to follow due to his lengthy points. All in all, a great history that could have been more concise.

As a collection of stories about marginalized groups during the American Revolution, Nash's book is informative and could be even enlightening to a general reader. For the more academic reader, Nash's book includes no new research. Nash obviously aims the book for the general audience as he writes in the preface that he hopes the book will prove an "antidote to historical amnesia." Yet, all the things Nash discusses are drawn from the work of other historians over the last 30+ years. Indians, women, slaves, and other minorities have hardly been ignored. In fact, they have dominated the field of early American history for the past 35 years. When a preeminent scholar puts together a book like this, which brings together different strands of recent scholarship, one expects some kind of synthesis. However, Nash never really ties any of his groups or stories together in any coherent way. Nash is forced to give each group its own chapter and self-contained narrative. Because of the this, the book reads more like a compendium than a synthesis. Overall, the book could be good for a general reader of books on the period seeking to break away from all the biographies of the founders to get a more rounded view of the time, but students of the period will find nothing new in either fact or insight.

(Audible)

This is the first book I've read that looks far and wide for the seeds of revolution, not just the continental congress and Sons of Liberty. Beyond Thomas Paine and Common Sense--where did the ideas, attitudes, and courage come from?

Detailed research and connections for how the Great Awakening religious movement gave not only spiritual independence to citizens, but the gift of oratory and laid the foundation for the assumption that if mankind can experience their own spiritual relationship with God without intervention from priests or ministers--then the next logical step was that mankind could govern themselves without the "little Gods on earth" royalty.

What these ideas meant to the white landowners and upper class--the educated elite who made up the continental congress--and what these ideas meant to artisans, enslaved, variety of Indian tribes and nations, women and recent immigrants from non-British countries is eye opening.

Highly researched, the author is excellent at pulling the threads together to create the tapestry of the movement.

I was surprised that there was a brief period where women could vote before the finalized constitution took those rights away again.

I shouldn't have been surprised at the ugly, horrific, despicable, acts that swirled around this noble idea of freedom and liberty. Freedom and liberty for some, but not women, not the poor, not people of color, and especially not Indians.

The variety of Indian tribes, allegiances, leaders, Nations and consistency of ruthless extermination all in a quest for land is nauseating. I had to take breaks as I listened to the book on my commute. The injustice of these acts; the injustice of burying this history--it was so much to face. I found myself crying in the car. Crying for the appalling treatment of human beings perpetrated by champions of "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." I grieved the loss of my own idealism.

How our nation treated the soldiers who fought the war is particularly egregious. The soldiers were promised pay, and never received it, or if they did it was in paper script that was worthless. Not feeding or supplying the soldiers--in a land of plenty, where crops abound--how is this possible? Why wasn't this addressed? And when soldiers, starving, barefooted in winter, shivering without shelter, blankets--without adequate CLOTHING--rebelled they were shot immediately as mutineers--I'm just appalled.

And then I think of our current VA and what happens to our servicemen and women now. How can we, as a country, ask so much of those in the service--and provide so little--and then renege on that.

I thought the founding fathers meant what they said.
I knew slavery was a clear indicator that they didn't really mean what they were saying, but I glossed over that. It was complex. Economic. Compromises had to be made in order to create a union.

Oh hell no. There's no glossing over this.

Our nation was birthed with the dreams of many peoples. And sadly, today we continue to fight for what should have been given at the very start-- "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

Like "A People's History of the United States" this book is a cornerstone of context, thoughts and facts that reorder my understanding of who we are as a nation and why we are the way we are today.

It ain't pretty.

We can do better.

HIGHLY RECOMMEND

If you read only one book on the American Revolution (I'd go so far as to say 'only one book on American history') make it this one.

I borrowed this from the library to take on vacation because my family history searches made me curious to know more about this period than I did. Much of the history we were taught about this period was "great men" and "great battles", accompanied by examining hagiographic paintings made either at the time (Benjamin Rush) or later, in the 19th Century. In a way, none of it made real sense. Was the Stamp Act the only thing the American colonists got excited about? Or quartering troops? What did it really mean to say 'no taxation without representation'? Why could Jefferson write the preamble to the Declaration of Independence yet continue to hold slaves?

There's no straight answer. The 35 years leading up to the outbreak of the Revolution were times of great change, upheaval and complexity. The 'people' weren't even 'a people' but a diverse lot of different groups: wealthier and poorer, newer immigrants and old settlers, farmers and countrymen and city-dwellers, merchants, artisans, workers, land-owners and tenants, slaves, a few free blacks and Indians, men and women, scattered over different colonies with different settlement patterns, religious orientations, and different histories. When some people said: 'no taxation without representation' they weren't talking about representation in the British Parliament, but about the narrow franchise that limited voting rights, including locally, to landholders with estates valued at at least £40, and about local taxes and local impositions, though these were exacerbated by fiscal policies emanating from the British crown and Parliament. At the outset of the crisis, there were no cries for abolition, but these quickly began, first from religious conviction and then because many found themselves in the quandary of advocating 'freedom' from British oppression when they themselves were oppressors of black Africans forcibly taken from their homeland to live in perpetual and inheritable servitude forever. And Native Americans were faced with the difficulties of living with encroaching white settlers.

Nash does a great service for the reader in bringing to one work all these (and other) disparate influences: class, location, economic woes, slavery, a distant government with local support (the Loyalists), women who began to believe that they too should have the rights to a say in their own government, Native Americans seeing their lands and livelihoods (and often their lives) snatched away.

My only niggle was that there are a few annoying editorial slips here and there.

Since originally posting this review I have found that those of my ancestors who fought in the Revolutionary War weren't as overjoyed with what they were left with after 1789 as the standard histories would have us believe. A sheaf of over 50 pages of letters has come into my hands, and the writers (farmers and artisans all) all, clearly, believed themselves let down in the long run. I thank Gary Nash's book for prompting me to look further, in primary sources.

I bought eight or ten history tomes from the used book shelves at my local liberry.

I felt kind of guilty; the titles were all interesting, but I was not sure I would ever take the time to read them.

Then The Plague hit us, and the liberry is closed.

Sure glad I had these books around.

This book, along with "War of Two" by Sedgewick, and "Undaunted Courage" by Ambrose, have completely changed the way I look at the founding and early days of Our Union.

Awesome. Truly Awesome Stuff.

This is not the first book you should read on the movement for American independence, but provides a detailed, edgy corrective to getting carried away with revolutionary myths. Nash shows how revolutionary leaders throughout this period sought to manage, and in some cases betrayed, the poor, nonwhite and women inspired by the revolutionary rhetoric. Shameful treatment of native populations is not overlooked.