 | The Cousins' Wars: Religion, Politics, Civil Warfare, And The Triumph Of Anglo-America by Kevin Phillips
Buy new: $16.47 / Used from: $0.61 The American Revolution contextualized with the English Civil Wars and the later American Civil War.
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 | Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture) by Woody Holton
Buy new: $18.44 / Used from: $9.95 The causes of the Revolution were not the same in the southern colonies as in Philly or Boston. One was the institution of slavery.
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 | Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution by Simon Schama
Buy used from: $1.00 This is the second book on my list to suggest that slavery was already a causative issue in the American Revolution.
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 | The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution by Alfred F. Young
Buy new: $12.96 / Used from: $1.96 The "shoemaker" was an artisan radical, who wrote of his experiences decades after the Revolution
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 | Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism: Political Ideology in Late Eighteenth-Century England and America by Isaac Kramnick
Buy used from: $25.42 Intellectual history, very dry but very insightful.
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 | The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution by Bernard Bailyn
Buy new: $21.68 / Used from: $6.30 Bailyn is the master chef of the intellectual history cafe at Harvard. The title is enough to suggest Bailyn's thesis.
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 | Faces of Revolution: Personalities & Themes in the Struggle for American Independence by Bernard Bailyn
Buy new: $11.53 / Used from: $1.36 |
 | To Begin the World Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of the American Founders by Bernard Bailyn
Buy new: $11.16 / Used from: $2.08 |
 | The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson by Bernard Bailyn
Buy used from: $2.74 |
 | Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance by Jay Fliegelman
Buy new: $27.95 / Used from: $10.53 Post-modernist, psychologically informed, hard to read but worthwhile.
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 | From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765-1776 by Pauline Maier
Buy new: $11.53 / Used from: $3.78 Maier is what some shallow folk damn as a revisionist. Her insights are deep and well supported.
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 | American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence by Pauline Maier
Buy new: $10.17 / Used from: $2.23 Maier as an iconoclast.
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| A People Numerous and Armed: Reflections on the Military Struggle for American Independence (Galaxy Books) by John Shy
Buy used from: $1.59 An older book, still well worth reading.
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 | War And Society in the American Revolution: Mobilization And Home Fronts
Buy new: $22.50 / Used from: $9.15 This and the Shy book complement each other.
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 | The Long Fuse: How England Lost the American Colonies 1760-1785 by Don Cook
Buy new: $10.88 / Used from: $3.29 The view from the other side of the puddle.
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 | The Radicalism of the American Revolution by Gordon S. Wood
Buy new: $12.21 / Used from: $4.61 Gordon Wood is probably the most-read historian these days, and his work is solid though not always paradigm-challenging. His style is pedestrian, which accounts for the extra length of most of his books.
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 | Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different by Gordon S. Wood
Buy new: $10.88 / Used from: $3.65 More of Wood.
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 | The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin by Gordon S. Wood
Buy new: $10.88 / Used from: $0.29 Perhaps Wood's most thought-provoking study.
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 | The Rising Glory Of America, 1760-1820
Buy new: $33.00 / Used from: $2.65 Textbookish.
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 | Paul Revere's Ride by David Hackett Fischer
Buy new: $14.93 / Used from: $4.67 Revere perceived as an artisan radical. A very engrossing book, and a quick read by Fischer's standards.
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 | Washington's Crossing (Pivotal Moments in American History) by David Hackett Fischer
Buy new: $13.57 / Used from: $4.46 Revere is better, but this is also an important frame-shifting study.
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 | Bound Away: Virginia and the Westward Movement by David H. Fischer
Buy new: $14.65 / Used from: $12.75 Fischer sees Virginia as the mother culture of much of America, particularly the current alignment of Red States.
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 | The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (Studies in North American Indian History) by Richard White
Buy new: $25.89 / Used from: $10.00 The conflicts and the results of the Revolution were distinct in the Ohio-Great Lakes region. This is an amazing fine-grained, detailed study, history at the village level.
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 | The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution by Alan Taylor
Buy new: $11.53 / Used from: $6.97 Complements the Richard White study.
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 | Thomas Paine's Rights of Man: A Biography (Books That Changed the World) by Christopher Hitchens
Buy new: $15.35 / Used from: $3.45 I despise the fact that Hitchens's picture is on the cover, but the book is worth reading in its tendentious manner. Paine was in a sense the tip of the iceberg of "lower class" radicalism in the Revolutionary era.
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 | A World on Fire: A Heretic, an Aristocrat, and the Race to Discover Oxygen by Joe Jackson
Buy new: $10.88 / Used from: $4.09 Joseph Priestley and Antoine Lavoisier -- English and French Radicalism formed the background of the American Revolution. This book is well worth reading for anyone interested in the history of science, also.
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Listmania!
