Notes

• "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."–BOOK JACKET