Telling the history of the American Revolution from the often-overlooked standpoint of its everyday participants, this is an involving narrative of the wartime experience designed to convey the best of modern scholarship to a general reading audience. Our understanding of the origins and consequences of the American war with Britain has now been greatly expanded by examining previously marginalized stories, those of the common people, slave and free who made up the majority of pre-revolutionary America. A broad array of diaries and other first person accounts are woven into the narrative. The focus moves on from leaders like Washington and Jefferson to the slaves they owned, the Indians they displaced, the men and boys who did the fighting and the women who endured it.