Growing up outside London in the 1980s and 1990s, I learned almost nothing about the American Revolution. After all, who wants to teach schoolchildren that their nation once fought a war against farmers with muskets—and lost? I didn’t discover the subject until senior year of college, but when I did, it turned my life upside down. Long story short, I now teach the Revolution every semester to college students in the United States. So I’ve been reading hungrily about the topic for decades now—trying to catch up on lost time—and these books are the five that have convinced me that America’s founding fight was actually a world war in all but name.
I love Epic Journeys of Freedom because the Australian historian Cassandra Pybus follows some of the most extraordinary lives I’ve ever encountered in history—and she tracks them to the ends of the earth.
The scope of this book is just breathtaking. Cassandra traces the odyssey of Black Americans like Harry Washington, who escaped slavery (at George Washington’s Mount Vernon), fought for their freedom, and found their way first to British Canada and eventually to Sierra Leone in West Africa.
If you want to see why historians love their jobs—how we get to be both detective and time traveler then this is the book for you.
Cassandra Pybus adds greatly to the work of [previous] scholars by insisting that slaves stand at the center of their own history . . . Her 'biographies' of flight expose the dangers that escape entailed and the courage it took to risk all for freedom. Only by measuring those dangers can the exhilaration of success be comprehended and the unspeakable misery of failure be appreciated.--Ira Berlin, from the Foreword
During the American Revolution, thousands of slaves fled their masters to find freedom with the British. Epic Journeys of Freedom is the astounding story of these runaways and the lives they…
Reading Independence Lost made the American Revolution, something I’d been studying and teaching about for twenty years, feel startlingly new—and I recommend it to everyone so they can feel its magic for themselves.
It’s no wonder it won so many prizes! What’s captivating is how deftly Kathleen DuVal shifts the focus away from the familiar sites in Boston and Philadelphia to the Gulf Coast, revealing a world of Native nations, Spanish governors, free Black strivers, and Creole merchants all swept up in their own fights for independence—and all defining ‘independence’ differently.
A rising-star historian offers a significant new global perspective on the Revolutionary War with the story of the conflict as seen through the eyes of the outsiders of colonial society
Winner of the Journal of the American Revolution Book of the Year Award • Winner of the Society of the Cincinnati in the State of New Jersey History Prize • Finalist for the George Washington Book Prize
Over the last decade, award-winning historian Kathleen DuVal has revitalized the study of early America’s marginalized voices. Now, in Independence Lost, she recounts an untold story as rich and significant as that of…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I love Hessians because Friederike Baer takes what’s normally a footnote into the history of the American Revolution—the role of German soldiers hired by King George to fight alongside the redcoats—and puts them center stage.
The result completely upended my picture of the American Revolution, and I was dazzled by Friederike’s ability to restore depth and humanity to those so often dismissed as faceless “mercenaries.” I love how she traces their experiences—from the battlefields to the quiet, uncertain years after the war—with such care and empathy.
Reading Hessians felt like meeting the Revolution’s most feared bogeymen—and finally hearing them speak.
Between 1776 and 1783, Britain hired an estimated 30,000 German soldiers to fight in its war against the Americans. Collectively known as Hessians, they actually came from six German territories within the Holy Roman Empire. Over the course of the war, members of the German corps, including women and children, spent extended periods of time in locations as dispersed and varied as Canada in the North to West Florida and Cuba in the South. They shared in every significant British military triumph and defeat. Thousands died of disease, were killed in battle, were captured by the enemy, or deserted.
This is probably the most obscure book on this list, but it’s also one of the absolute best.
I knew little about the topic—the fate of Britain’s convicts during and after the American Revolution—but it grabbed me by the collar and refused to let go.
Full of empathy and precision, Emma Christopher takes us into the bowels of Britain’s penal world, and I love how she turns what could’ve been a grim topic—convict transportation, punishment, exile—into a deeply human saga of endurance, injustice, incompetence, and improvisation that ranges from Virginia to Africa to Australia.
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
This is probably the first book I ever read that made me think of the American Revolution as an event in global history.
I was mesmerized by how Maya Jasanoff gives voice to the Loyalists—the people American history usually forgets—as they faced uncertain futures as exiles in the remnants of the British empire after 1783.
And Maya writes like I want to write, absorbing readers in the human messiness of loss, loyalty, and belonging. I love how she connects intimate, personal stories to the vast sweep of empire, turning difficult work in dozens of dusty archives into living, breathing drama.
This book is wild. It tells the globe-spanning story of how thirteen scrappy colonies rattled an empire—and set off shockwaves that reached far beyond their own shores. This isn’t your high-school version of the Revolution, the usual tedious march from Lexington and Concord to Yorktown.
No, this one is different. It’s a story of former turncoats contemplating suicide in London, enslaved people seizing freedom in Virginia, Nova Scotia, and Sierra Leone, and patriot POWs left for dead in black hole detention sites on the other side of the world. I explain how the American fight for liberty inspired—and terrified—people from Peru to India, and is even directly responsible for the first prison colony in Australia.
