1776

Wishing everyone a safe and happy July 4th weekend!

Whirlwind: The American Revolution and the War that Won it
by John Ferling

From servants to citizens: a nuanced study of the American Revolution focused on how the war changed the way Americans saw themselves. Having written abundantly about the Revolutionary War, accomplished scholar Ferling (Emeritus, History/Univ. of West Georgia; Jefferson and Hamilton: The Rivalry that Forged a Nation, 2013, etc.) employs his extensive knowledge to relay a tremendously complicated and multi layered story of the gradual embracing of ideas of independence by the once-loyal colonists. (Kirkus Reviews)

George Washington's Secret Six: The Spy Ring that Saved the American Revolution
by Brian Kilmeade and Don Yaeger.

When General George Washington beat a hasty retreat from New York City in August 1776, many thought the American Revolution might soon be over. Instead, Washington rallied thanks in large part to a little-known, top-secret group called the Culper Spy Ring. In George Washington’s Secret Six, Townsend and his fellow spies finally receive their due, taking their place among the pantheon of heroes of the American Revolution. (Publisher Summary)

Facing East from Indian Country: a Native History of Early America by Daniel Richter

Viewed from Indian country, the sixteenth century was an era in which Native people discovered Europeans and struggled to make sense of a new world. Well into the seventeenth century, the most profound challenges to Indian life came less from the arrival of a relative handful of European colonists than from the biological, economic, and environmental forces. Drawing upon their own traditions, Indian communities reinvented themselves and carved out a place in a world dominated by transatlantic European empires. In 1776, however, when some of Britain's colonists rebelled against that imperial world, they overturned the system that had made Euro-American and Native coexistence possible. Eastern North America only ceased to be an Indian country because the revolutionaries denied the continent's first peoples a place in the nation they were creating. (Publisher Summary)