Most Americans know Patrick Henry as a fiery speaker whose pronouncement "Give me liberty or give me death!" rallied American defiance to the British Crown. But Henry's skills as an orator -- sharpened in the small towns and courtrooms of colonial Virginia -- are only one part of his vast, but largely forgotten, legacy. As historian Thomas S. Kidd shows, Henry cherished a vision of America as a virtuous republic with a clearly circumscribed central government. These ideals brought him into bitter conflict with other Founders and were crystallized in his vociferous opposition to the U.S. Constitution. In Patrick Henry, Kidd pulls back the curtain on one of our most radical, passionate Founders, showing that until we understand Henry himself, we will neglect many of the Revolution's animating values.

What role do nationalism and popular protest play in China's foreign relations? Chinese authorities permitted anti-American demonstrations in 1999 but repressed them in 2001 during two crises in U.S.-China relations. Anti-Japanese protests were tolerated in 1985, 2005, and 2012 but banned in 1990 and 1996. Protests over Taiwan, the issue of greatest concern to Chinese nationalists, have never been allowed. To explain this variation, Powerful Patriots identifies the diplomatic as well as domestic factors that drive protest management in authoritarian states. Because nationalist protests are costly to repress and may turn against the government, allowing protests demonstrates resolve and makes compromise more costly in diplomatic relations. Repressing protests, by contrast, sends a credible signal of reassurance, facilitating diplomatic flexibility. Powerful Patriots traces China's management of dozens of nationalist protests and their consequences between 1985 and 2012.

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 compelling 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 gives the history of these ordinary Americans but, drawing upon a wealth of rarely seen documents, restores their primacy to American 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.

As England and her American colonies went to war, the loyalties of good men and women were put to the test. This is their story. The Patriots Esau and Jacob Morgan had been at odds with each other since their births moments apart. Their rivalry had spanned three decades and reached its peak when Jacob practically stole the attractive Mercy Reed for his wife while Esau, her fiancé was away studying in England. Now Jared and Anne Morgan are forced to watch as their sons take opposing stands in the struggle for American liberty. Will the war for independence tear the Morgans apart? And if they survive, will the Morgan family faith and Bible continue in America, or will they return to England where it all started? Follow the Morgan family as they are tossed about by the tides of conflict--from the battlefields of Lexington and Concord to the deadly winter encampment at Valley Forge to the seats of colonial power in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York--as their lives cross paths with influential men and women who changed the course of history.

"This truly transnational history reveals the important role of Americans abroad in the Age of Revolution, as well as providing an early example of the limits of American influence on other nations. From the beginning of the French Revolution to its end at the hands of Napoleon, American cosmopolitans like Thomas Jefferson, Gouverneur Morris, Thomas Paine, Joel Barlow, and James Monroe drafted constitutions, argued over violent means and noble ends, confronted sudden regime changes, and negotiated diplomatic crises such as the XYZ Affair and the Louisiana Purchase." "Eager to report on what they regarded as universal political ideals and practices, Americans again and again confronted the particular circumstances of a foreign nation in turmoil. In turn, what they witnessed in Paris caused these prominent Americans to reflect on the condition and prospects of their own republic. Thus, their individual stories highlight overlooked parallels between the nation-building process in both France and America, and the two countries' common struggle to reconcile the rights of man with their own national identity." --Book Jacket.

The Lives and Times of the Patriots was first published in 1938, the centennial of the Upper Canadian Rebellion and the subsequent Patriot raids over the border from the United States. The Canadian part of the agitation for constitutional and social reform, long a subject of controversy and bitterness, is now generally considered to be, as Sir Wilfrid Laurier put it, a fight "for constitutional rights, not against the British Crown"; but very little in the American movement, allegedly in sympathy, can be justified, its aims and conduct being no better than—and often interior to—the Fenian Raids of some thirty years later. The story of the events and their consequences is unfolded from a wide coverage of source materials, and described from both Tory and Reform, Loyalist and Patriot point of view. Exciting trails and escapes from jails and forts follow one another in quick succession, and the lives and experiences of participants are traced around the world to the prison colony of Van Diemen's Land and home again, as diaries, letters, and narratives tell their story, supplemented and verified by official documents, contemporary newspapers, obituary notices, and tombstone inscriptions. Rare illustrations complement this careful account of what must be taken to be, with all its deficiencies, a notable episode in the history of human freedom.