Revolution Song: The Story of America's Founding in Six Remarkable Lives

by Russell Shorto

Overview

“An engaging piece of historical detective work and narrative craft.” —Chicago Tribune

At a time when America’s founding principles are being debated as never before, Russell Shorto looks back to the era in which those principles were forged. In Revolution Song, Shorto weaves the lives of six people into a seamless narrative that casts fresh light on the range of experience in colonial America on the cusp of revolution. The result is a brilliant defense of American values with a compelling message: the American Revolution is still being fought today, and its ideals are worth defending.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393245554
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	11/07/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	512
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Russell Shorto is the best-selling author of The Island at the Center of the World, Amsterdam, and Revolution Song, and a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine. He lives in Cumberland, Maryland.

Table of Contents

Preface xi

Prologue 1

Part 1

Chapter 1 Sons of Fathers 13

Chapter 2 A Tide in the Affairs of Men 37

Chapter 3 The Turtle's Back 53

Part 2

Chapter 4 The Charming Sound of Bullets 75

Chapter 5 World on Fire 92

Chapter 6 This Land I Have Made for You and Not for Others 119

Chapter 7 The Spirit That Rages 151

Chapter 8 Thirteen Toasts 178

Chapter 9 Assuming Command 203

Chapter 10 A Natural Inclination to Liberty 219

Chapter 11 The City of New York Will, in All Human Probability, Very Soon Be the Scene of a Bloody Conflict 252

Chapter 12 So Celestial an Article 273

Chapter 13 Cannons Muskets Drums 296

Chapter 14 White Freedom 326

Chapter 15 I Am Your Son! I Am a Warrior! 355

Chapter 16 Numberless Meteors Gleaming Through the Atmosphere 370

Part 3

Chapter 17 The Cause of Humanity 395

Chapter 18 Rough Hewer 416

Chapter 19 Glowing with Zeal for the General Happiness and Improvement of Mankind 440

Chapter 20 Which Nothing Else Can Equal 476

Epilogue 505

Acknowledgments 511

Notes 515

Bibliography 557

Index 579

Editorial Reviews

"Timely and engaging.… [Shorto] explores the philosophical currents of the revolutionary era through an unusual assemblage of life stories.… Their experiences make for a compelling narrative, rich in unexpected twists, turns, and parallels, that allows Shorto to explore how engagement with revolutionary ideals reflected social and economic class, gender, region, race, culture, and political allegiance."

Booklist (starred review)

"Russell Shorto has long had an astonishing talent for adjusting the focus in ways that make familiar swaths of history seem intriguingly foreign and fresh. With Revolution Song, he’s worked his magic again. Through his vigorous language, his mastery of archival sources, and the pleasing interweave of his six carefully chosen characters, Shorto has composed a powerful polyphonic story, simultaneously grand and intimate, that makes us hear (and see and feel) the tumult of our nation’s founding as never before."

Hampton Sides

"The intertwined stories of Revolution Song give a sense of how far-reaching a phenomenon the War of Independence was. It leaves to readers the pleasure of judging what each of the figures in the book—or perhaps the combination of them all—contributed to an event that changed the world."

New York Times Book Review

"Russell Shorto’s engaging new book appears at a moment when basic concepts of rights and equality are routinely disparaged. As if in response to our troubled political culture, he invites readers to return to the American Revolution to understand better how an 18th-century commitment to freedom took root and became a fundamental, unifying value in our nation’s history."

T. H. Breenn Scholar

"We as Native Americans tend to relay our history in story form. The people become real in our minds and the stories vivid and compelling. Shorto has succeeded in telling this tale as a master Native storyteller would. He weaves the complex strands of time together wonderfully as if I were hearing them in the warm firelight of a bark longhouse."

Michael Galban

"Shorto has taken the lives of six very different figures, ranging from a high British official to an African slave, and woven them seamlessly together into an engaging, readable, and surprisingly complete account of the American Revolution. A tour de force."

Gordon S. Wood

"With symphonic sweep, cinematic detail, and compelling, superbly researched real-life characters—including an iron-willed slave, a war-weary Iroquois statesman, and an ambitious planter named George Washington—Shorto shows how our struggle for freedom began and why it remains so sadly unfinished. If Spielberg wrote history, this is how it would read."

Howard Fineman

"Brilliant, captivating and fast-paced, Revolution Song is a wonderfully original take on the American Revolution that reads like a thriller. I couldn’t put this book down."

Amy Chua

"How did the teenaged daughter of a British officer view the American Revolution, from behind enemy lines in New York? What did that contest mean to a shrewd, contemplative Iroquois warrior? Russell Shorto has emerged from the archives with a bold, largely neglected cast. He has set them free in a rich, prismatic narrative, as intensely vivid as it is seamlessly constructed."

Stacy Schiff

"Russell Shorto’s engaging new book appears at a moment when basic concepts of rights and equality are routinely disparaged. As if in response to our troubled political culture, he invites readers to return to the American Revolution to understand better how an 18th-century commitment to freedom took root and became a fundamental, unifying value in our nation’s history."

American Scholar - T. H. Breen