Audiobook13 hours
American Insurgents, American Patriots: The Revolution of the People
Written by T. H. Breen
Narrated by John Pruden
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
4/5
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About this audiobook
Before there could be a revolution, there was a rebellion; before patriots, there were insurgents. Challenging and displacing decades of received wisdom, T. H. Breen's strikingly original book explains how ordinary Americans-most of them members of farm families living in small communities-were drawn into a successful insurgency against imperial authority. This is the story of our national political origins that most Americans do not know. It is a story of rumor, charity, vengeance, and restraint. American Insurgents, American Patriots reminds us that revolutions are violent events. They provoke passion and rage, a willingness to use violence to achieve political ends, a deep sense of betrayal, and a strong religious conviction that God expects an oppressed people to defend their rights. The American Revolution was no exception.
A few celebrated figures in the Continental Congress do not make for a revolution. It requires tens of thousands of ordinary men and women willing to sacrifice, kill, and be killed. Breen not only tells the history of these ordinary Americans but, drawing upon a wealth of rarely seen documents, restores their primacy to America's road to independence. Mobilizing two years before the Declaration of Independence, American insurgents in all thirteen colonies concluded that resistance to British oppression required organized violence against the state. They channeled popular rage through elected committees of safety and observation, which before 1776 were the heart of American resistance. American Insurgents, American Patriots is the stunning account of their insurgency, without which there would have been no independent republic as we know it.
A few celebrated figures in the Continental Congress do not make for a revolution. It requires tens of thousands of ordinary men and women willing to sacrifice, kill, and be killed. Breen not only tells the history of these ordinary Americans but, drawing upon a wealth of rarely seen documents, restores their primacy to America's road to independence. Mobilizing two years before the Declaration of Independence, American insurgents in all thirteen colonies concluded that resistance to British oppression required organized violence against the state. They channeled popular rage through elected committees of safety and observation, which before 1776 were the heart of American resistance. American Insurgents, American Patriots is the stunning account of their insurgency, without which there would have been no independent republic as we know it.
Author
T. H. Breen
T. H. Breen is the William Smith Mason Professor of American History at Northwestern University. The author of several works of history, including The Marketplace of Revolution and American Insurgents, American Patriots, Breen has also written for The New York Times Magazine, the London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, and The New York Times Book Review. He lives in Evanston, Illinois.
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Reviews for American Insurgents, American Patriots
Rating: 3.8260868652173916 out of 5 stars
4/5
23 ratings3 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5If you study popular books on the American Revolution, it's easy to come away with the idea that the Revolution was led by the 56 men, give or take a few that were taking care of business elsewhere during pivotal moments in American history. American Insurgents, American Patriots shows that there's much more to the story than that.From the role of the Black Regiment to the periodicals and pamphleteers to every day working men — and women — this book tells the story of a revolution that would never have succeeded without the blood, sweat and tears of the common people.T. H. Breen's style of writing is engaging and easy to understand without being pedantic. I listened to the audio version narrated by John Pruden, one of my favorite narrators for this type of book. His elocution and pace are pitch perfect.For the most part, Breen provides a source for the claims he makes. For example, when he shares the opinions of Elizabeth Shaw, a Tory who saw the events from a decidedly different point of view, you know he's getting the information directly the source. Or at least her letters, since she's been long gone. I did a quick "look inside" on Amazon and there are plenty of footnotes - enough to satisfy even the most source hungry among us.Breen doesn't gloss over the events of the Revolution either. While there is no outright murder of Tories mentioned, plenty of lives are destroyed and at least one dies from a splinter in his groin (ouch!) after being paraded about on a rail. The fact that there wasn't more death directly attributed to the protest and informal action always struck me as the best evidence of divine intervention.That said, Breen is far more factual and less agenda-driven than I've come to expect from most academics. (You would think they would all be unbiased, but you would be wrong, these days.) I am adding T.H. Breen to my list of favorite authors of American history, and I am eager to read another one of his books. My only problem is going to be choosing which one.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Persuasive, interesting, and historically-grounded argument that widespread popular sentiment for independence from Britain was evident by 1774. Nothing against the Founding Fathers and their actions, asserts the author, but their proclamation of independence in 1776 was the tail wagging a dog that already had manifested itself in many different places and ways. I enjoyed this book, which sheds an angle I hadn't thought much about regarding the insurgents who underpinned and provided the muscle for the War of Independence. I didn't realize the popular fervent for independence was so widespread. I'll need to learn more about the Revolutionary War to understand why Gen. Washington's troops had such a hard time with loyalists in and around New York in 1776. (See "1776" by David McCullough.) Given Breen's characterization of the overall situation in 1774-6, I'd have thought the American fighters would have met a friendlier local population that was more supportive to their cause.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Using original documents from the "middling sort" of people, Breen makes a case that the American REvolution was a popular insurgency, where the "leaders", the people we think of as the Founding Fathers, had to work hard to keep up with what the people were doing on the ground--and doing, as Breen says "without consulting a single Founding Father."The scholarship is forst-rate throughout, but the narrative falls apart in places, becoming redundent and losing coherence. The last chapter reads like it was just tacked on to improve page-count. The book could have been 5-star with a better editor and another draft, I think.