People's History of the American Revolution - How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence

The best single-volume history of the Revolution I have read.Howard ZinnThe first major effort to tell the history of the American Revolution from the often overlooked standpoints of its everyday participants, A Peoples History of the American Revolution is a highly accessible narrative of the wartime experience that brings in the stories of previously marginalized voices: the common people, slave and free, who made up the majority in eighteenth-century America.This first volume in The New Press Peoples History Series skillfully weaves diaries, personal letters, and other long-overlooked primary source material into the historical narrative. The result is a remarkable first-person perspective on the events leading up to and during the war. With a simple shift of the focus of historys lensaway from Revolutionary leaders such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and on to the slaves they owned, the Indians they displaced, and the men and boys who did the fightingauthor Ray Raphael brings us a true peoples history of the Revolutionary experience.