The first exploration of the profound and often catastrophic impact the American Revolution had on the rest of the world. While the American Revolution led to domestic peace and liberty, it ultimately had a catastrophic global impact-it strengthened the British Empire and led to widespread persecution and duress. From the opium wars in China to anti-imperial rebellions in Peru to the colonization of Australia-the inspirational impact the American success had on fringe uprisings was outweighed by the influence it had on the tightening fists of oppressive world powers. Here Matthew Lockwood presents, in vivid detail, the neglected story of this unintended revolution. It sowed the seeds of collapse for the preeminent empires of the early modern era, setting the stage for the global domination of Britain, Russia, and the United States. Lockwood illuminates the forgotten stories and experiences of the communities and individuals who adapted to this new world in which the global balance of power had been drastically altered.--Adapted from jacket.

Why was George Washington dismayed by the outcome of the American Revolution? Would slavery still exist if the South had not seceded from the Union in 1861? Might socialists rule America today if Teddy Roosevelt had not run for President and lost in 1912? History is full of contingencies. People confront problems and debate options for solving them. Then they make a choice and face the consequences of their choice. Often they wonder if a different choice might have been better. Was the American Revolution a mistake? Was racial segregation inevitable? Was the Cold War necessary? Americans have repeatedly asked these sorts of questions as they examined the consequences of their choices. This is a book about revisiting crucial choices people made in history and examining the consequences of those choices for them and for us. It demonstrates a method of teaching history that recreates events as people experienced them, and asks important questions that troubled them but that rarely appear in conventional textbooks. Unlike conventional methods that often reduce history to names, dates and factoids for students to memorize, it is a method that brings past debates to life, the losers' as well as the winners' points of view, and makes the subject exciting. In studying history as choice, students examine the problems people faced, their options for solving them, their decision-making processes, and the choices they made. Then students evaluate the consequences of those choices both for people in the past and us today. They explore what might have happened if different choices had been made. Finally, students relate the consequences of those past choices to problems we face today and the choices we need to make. History as choice is a practical and practicable method. It has been designed to satisfy the curriculum goals of the National Council for the Social Studies, and the book explains how it can be used to satisfy any state or local curriculum standards. The book also identifies and illustrates resources that can be used with this method -- from data bases to popular music -- and explains how teachers can gradually integrate it into their courses. In the first part of the book, the method of history as choice is explained using the question of whether the American Revolution was a mistake as a case in point. The second part of the book explores thirteen other questions about significant issues and events in American history as additional examples of how one might teach history as choice.

In this assessment of America's War of Independence, Stauber presents a reinterpretation of the birth and the subsequent development of the United States.

The Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author of First Family presents a revelatory account of America's declaration of independence and the political and military responses on both sides throughout the summer of 1776 that influenced key decisions and outcomes.

Questioning popular belief, a historian and re-examines what exactly led to the British Empire’s loss of the American Revolution. The loss of America was an unexpected defeat for the powerful British Empire. Common wisdom has held that incompetent military commanders and political leaders in Britain must have been to blame, but were they? This intriguing book makes a different argument. Weaving together the personal stories of ten prominent men who directed the British dimension of the war, historian Andrew O’Shaughnessy dispels the incompetence myth and uncovers the real reasons that rebellious colonials were able to achieve their surprising victory. In interlinked biographical chapters, the author follows the course of the war from the perspectives of King George III, Prime Minister Lord North, military leaders including General Burgoyne, the Earl of Sandwich, and others who, for the most part, led ably and even brilliantly. Victories were frequent, and in fact the British conquered every American city at some stage of the Revolutionary War. Yet roiling political complexities at home, combined with the fervency of the fighting Americans, proved fatal to the British war effort. The book concludes with a penetrating assessment of the years after Yorktown, when the British achieved victories against the French and Spanish, thereby keeping intact what remained of the British Empire. “A remarkable book about an important but curiously underappreciated subject: the British side of the American Revolution. With meticulous scholarship and an eloquent writing style, O'Shaughnessy gives us a fresh and compelling view of a critical aspect of the struggle that changed the world.”—Jon Meacham, author of Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

A major American intellectual and “one of the right’s most gifted and astute journalists” (The New York Times Book Review) makes the historical case that the reforms of the 1960s, reforms intended to make the nation more just and humane, left many Americans feeling alienated, despised, misled—and ready to put an adventurer in the White House. Christopher Caldwell has spent years studying the liberal uprising of the 1960s and its unforeseen consequences and his conclusion is this: even the reforms that Americans love best have come with costs that are staggeringly high—in wealth, freedom, and social stability—and that have been spread unevenly among classes and generations. Caldwell reveals the real political turning points of the past half-century, taking you on a roller-coaster ride through Playboy magazine, affirmative action, CB radio, leveraged buyouts, iPhones, Oxycotin, Black Lives Matter, and internet cookies. In doing so, he shows that attempts to redress the injustices of the past have left Americans living under two different ideas of what it means to play by the rules. Essential, timely, hard to put down, The Age of Entitlement “is an eloquent and bracing book, full of insight” (New York magazine) about how the reforms of the past fifty years gave the country two incompatible political systems—and drove it toward conflict.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “An elegant synthesis done by the leading scholar in the field, which nicely integrates the work on the American Revolution over the last three decades but never loses contact with the older, classic questions that we have been arguing about for over two hundred years.”—Joseph J. Ellis, author of Founding Brothers A magnificent account of the revolution in arms and consciousness that gave birth to the American republic. When Abraham Lincoln sought to define the significance of the United States, he naturally looked back to the American Revolution. He knew that the Revolution not only had legally created the United States, but also had produced all of the great hopes and values of the American people. Our noblest ideals and aspirations-our commitments to freedom, constitutionalism, the well-being of ordinary people, and equality-came out of the Revolutionary era. Lincoln saw as well that the Revolution had convinced Americans that they were a special people with a special destiny to lead the world toward liberty. The Revolution, in short, gave birth to whatever sense of nationhood and national purpose Americans have had. No doubt the story is a dramatic one: Thirteen insignificant colonies three thousand miles from the centers of Western civilization fought off British rule to become, in fewer than three decades, a huge, sprawling, rambunctious republic of nearly four million citizens. But the history of the American Revolution, like the history of the nation as a whole, ought not to be viewed simply as a story of right and wrong from which moral lessons are to be drawn. It is a complicated and at times ironic story that needs to be explained and understood, not blindly celebrated or condemned. How did this great revolution come about? What was its character? What were its consequences? These are the questions this short history seeks to answer. That it succeeds in such a profound and enthralling way is a tribute to Gordon Wood’s mastery of his subject, and of the historian’s craft.