Books & Video

Filter by ...

The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777
by Rick Atkinson
Published: 2019
The Indian World of George Washington
by Colin G. Calloway
Published: 2018
The Price of Greatness: Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and the Creation of American Oligarchy
by Jay Cost
Published: 2018
Apostles of Revolution: Jefferson, Paine, Monroe, and the Struggle Against the Old Order in America and Europe
by John Ferling
Published: 2018
In the Hurricane's Eye: The Genius of George Washington and the Victory at Yorktown
by Nathaniel Philbrick
Published: 2018
Young Washington: How Wilderness and War Forged America’s Founding Father
by Peter Stark
Published: 2018
John Marshall
John Marshall: The Man Who Made the Supreme Court
by Richard Brookhiser
Published: 2018
Without Precedent: Chief Justice John Marshall and His Times
by Joel Richard Paul
Published: 2018
Benjamin Rush
Rush: Revolutionary, Madness & the Visionary Doctor Who Became a Founding Father
by Stephen Fried
Published: 2018
Dr. Benjamin Rush: The Founding Father Who Healed a Wounded Nation
by Harlow Giles Unger
Published: 2018

Virtually all modern accounts of the Revolution begin in 1763 with the Peace of Paris, the great treaty that concluded the Seven Years’ War. Opening the story there, however, makes the imperial events and conflicts that followed the war — the controversy over the Sugar Act and the Stamp Act crisis — into precursors of the Revolution. No matter how strenuous their other disagreements, most modern historians have looked at the years after 1763 not as contemporary Americans and Britons saw them — as a postwar era vexed by the unanticipated problems in relations between the colonies and metropolis — but as what we in retrospect know those years to have been, a pre-Revolutionary period. By sneaking glances, in effect, at what was coming next, historians robbed their accounts of contingency and suggested, less by design than by inadvertence, that the independence and nationhood of the United States were somehow inevitable.

Fred Anderson
Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754 - 1766 (2000)