In a grand and immemsely readable synthesis of historical, political, cultural, and economic analysis, a prize-winning historian describes the events that made the American Revolution. Gordon S. Wood depicts a revolution that was about much more than a break from England, rather it transformed an almost feudal society into a democratic one, whose emerging realities sometimes baffled and disappointed its founding fathers. Gordon S. Wood is the Alva O. Way University Professor and professor of history emeritus at Brown University. His 1969 book, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787, received the Bancroft and John H. Dunning prizes and was nominated for the National Book Award. Wood’s 1992 book, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, won the Pulitzer Prize and the Emerson Prize. His 2009 book, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815, won the New-York Historical Society American History Book Prize. In 2010, Wood was awarded a National Humanities Medal by President Obama. He contributes regularly to the New Republic and the New York Review of Books.

Michael D. Hattem is the Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Knox College. He received his Ph.D. in History from Yale University in 2017 and served one year as a Schwartz Postdoctoral Fellow at the New-York Historical Society and Visiting Faculty at The New School. His current manuscript, Past and Prologue: The Politics of Memory in the American Revolution, explores the role of the historical past in revolutionary American culture and politics, particularly the importance of changing historical memories of the British and colonial pasts in shaping the dynamics of the coming of the American Revolution and the development of early American nationalism. The manuscript is currently under contract to Yale University Press. You can follow him on Twitter: @MichaelHattem.