A people's history of the American Revolution

"A People's History of the American Revolution skillfully weaves diaries, personal letters, memoirs, and other long-overlooked primary sources into a remarkable first-person account of the events leading up to and during the war. From this perspective, the long struggle for independence appears as far more than a simple fight to break from England.

Rather, Raphael reveals a complex and far-flung struggle - for rights and recognition, for maintaining ways of life that were under siege, and for overturning an oppressive social order whose overlords were often those same Revolutionary leaders who were making headlines.

With a simple shift of history's lens away from Revolutionary leaders such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, and onto the slaves they owned, the Indians they displaced, and the men and boys who did the fighting, Raphael brings us a true people's history of the Revolutionary experience."--BOOK JACKET.