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Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States turned history on its head for an entire generation of readers, telling the nation's story through the eyes of ordinary people—the slaves, workers, immigrants, women, and Native Americans who made history but who are typically left out of the historical record. In the two decades since its first publication, A People's History of the United States has been a revelation to thousands of Americans (it has sold over a half-million copies in the US alone), for whom Zinn's bottom-up approach afforded new and critical vantage points on the American past.
Now, under the direction of Howard Zinn, The New Press introduces a groundbreaking new series of original people's histories. Examining major events and eras in US as well as world history with the same critical lens that Zinn used for the whole of American history, The New Press People's Histories reinterpret the past for a new generation of readers.
The first book in the series, Ray Raphael's A People's History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence, is a provocative retelling of America's founding moment. As Zinn writes, "I can't think of a better way to launch the People's History series than with Ray Raphael's book on the American Revolution. He's done a superb job of research in both secondary and primary material. The book is rich with wonderful quotations from first-hand sources. His point of view, his narrative, perfectly match the intent of a 'people's history.' "
The first major effort to tell the history of the American Revolution from the often overlooked standpoints of its everyday participants, A People's History of the American Revolution is a highly accessible narrative of the wartime experience that brings in the stories of previously marginalized voices: the common people, slave and free, who made up the majority in eighteenth-century America. This first volume in The New Press People's History Series skillfully weaves diaries, personal letters, and other long-overlooked primary source material into the historical narrative. The result is a remarkable first-person perspective on the events leading up to and during the war. With a simple shift of the focus of history's lens—away from Revolutionary leaders such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and on to the slaves they owned, the Indians they displaced, and the men and boys who did the fighting—Raphael brings us a true people's history of the Revolutionary experience.

"[S]ets an admirable standard [for other books in this series]."

Ellen Clegg, Boston Globe, 04/06/2001

A People's History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence: Search Results