The Bancroft Prize–winning classic of American history now in a revised and expanded edition with a new preface and afterword by the author. On April 19, 1775, the American Revolution began at the Old North Bridge in Concord, Massachusetts. The “shot heard round the world” catapulted this sleepy New England town into the height of revolutionary fervor, and Concord went on to become the intellectual capital of the new republic. The town—future home to Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne—soon came to symbolize devotion to liberty, intellectual freedom, and the stubborn integrity of rural life. In The Minutemen and Their World, Robert A. Gross has written a remarkably subtle and detailed reconstruction of the lives and community of this special place, and a compelling interpretation of the American Revolution as a social movement.

In this delightful new photographic history, Concord, Massachusetts, is brought to life through extraordinary images and lively text. Readers are led through an exploration of the town's history, beginning in 1850, when the community's business and political life was concentrated along the Milldam from Monument Square to the Old Burying Ground. The Concord Free Public Library's special collections department made its repository of glass-plate images and photographs available for this historical view of Concord. Portraits of famous legislators and authors--such as Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson--vistas from rivers and hills, and a rare stereoscopic print of the 1875 centennial celebration are all included in these wonderful pages.

The text is closely confined to the colonial period; but the mode of presentation is extraordinary indeed to those accustomed to the prosaic methods of town and village historians. Mr. Hudson has tried to transport his readers and himself back two hundred years or more, as in a vision. In imagination we sit before the humble firesides of the first settlers; hear and join in their gossip, superstitions, and communings, social and religious; inspect their farm lands and homestends, and mark well and remember their boundaries and their family histories. At the same moment we are supposed to be living in the present, and viewing these days through the customary haze of retrospect. It is asking a good deal of any one to fancy himself in two centuries at the same time, but Mr. Hudson's humor is insistent on this point, and he keeps up the illusion, which is, unfortunately. no illusion whatever, and then finds himself on the safe road of steady and progressive narrative.

In the early spring of 1775, on a farm in Concord, Massachusetts, British army spies located four brass cannon belonging to Boston's colonial militia that had gone missing months before. British general Thomas Gage had been searching for them, both to stymie New England's growing rebellion and to erase the embarrassment of having let cannon disappear from armories under redcoat guard. Anxious to regain those weapons, he drew up plans for his troops to march nineteen miles into unfriendly territory. The Massachusetts Patriots, meanwhile, prepared to thwart the general's mission. There was one goal Gage and his enemies shared: for different reasons, they all wanted to keep the stolen cannon as secret as possible. Both sides succeeded well enough that the full story has never appeared until now. The Road to Concord: How Four Stolen Cannon Ignited the Revolutionary War by historian J. L. Bell reveals a new dimension to the start of America's War for Independence by tracing the spark of its first battle back to little-known events beginning in September 1774. Drawing on archives in the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada, the book creates a lively, original, and deeply documented picture of a society perched on the brink of war.