this book! Read for a Gold Leaf Senior College class on the American Revolution, Very detailed description of the life of the citizens of Concord Mass where the Revolution "started" on the north bridge, This book names names of the townspeople, marriages, economic booms and busts of individual families, and those who gathered to fire the first shots, Concord was really fighting to preserve their way of life, something that changed dramatically in the years during and following the war, Certain similarities exist in our own times with the economic vagaries, political play, and homage to a few wealthy men who tended to run things before and after the war.
A Bancroft Award winner in, I believe, this is a fairly short book as history studies goor so pages, but it packs a punch and provides an illuminating glimpse about the social, cultural, and economic forces that converged to radicalize the commonpeople of Concord, MA to rise up and defy imperial authority.
Fascinating and wellresearched book. I had to read “The Minutemen and their World” for my history class, This book was honestly really boring to read, Reading about the town of Concord during the American Revolution was interesting, and I like the story of different townspeople Gross weaves into it, However, the author uses way too many numbers, dates and figures, and that made it hard for the book to keep my interest unfortunately, An interesting social history of Concord, MA during the Revolution, I was surprised it was not a military history almost at allthere were only a handful of pages that looked at 'the shot heard 'round the world.
' The overall synthesis, however, of different materials was very interesting, I especially loved learning of the roles that women and slaves had in the minutemen work which of course was limited, but there was some more wiggle room than people usually assume.
Read this book for my history class, really gave me a new perspective on the role Concord played in the American Revolution! A really wellwritten and compellingly told story of the town that played host to the "shot heard round the world," and the varied forces that led to its participation in the revolution.
Gross makes clear the complexity of Concord's involvement: the American Revolution was not an inevitable happening for Concord, nor was there uniform rejoicing in its outcomes,
./. This book really captured me, I expected to read the introduction, the topic sentences, and the conclusion, as us grad students are wont to do when we have stacks upon stacks of books to read.
But, despite my need to sleep, I ended up reading almost every word of this one, The subject matter is engrossing, although I do feel that Gross doesn't have much of a thesis, But, still, it stands as a classic and as a great example of new social history, I haven't loved a history book as much as I loved this one in a long time, Great storytelling of the Revolutionary Era, at the hyperlocal level, Just brilliantly done. An excellent little book though its argument is shaky, Gross describes life in the town of Concord, Massachusetts in the years before, during, and after the American Revolution, He argues that the Revolution marked a significant change in Concordians' consciousness they became more individualistic, egalitarian, resistant to authority, What Gross actually shows, however, is that the key changes in Concord community life began decades before the Revolution and continued to gather force for decades after.
It was not the American Revolution that produced Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, but a long process of geographic, economic, and spiritual fragmentation in New England.
This evolution probably contributed to the Revolution, but the Revolution hardly seems to have accelerated it at all, Though generally interested in the topic, I approached this book primarily as a trial run with Gross's methods as a granular social historian in deciding whether to get his recent and massive sitelinkThe Transcendentalists and Their World.
It proved beneficial on both counts, Gross resuscitated and enlivened a period in American history that had become rote in its embossed romanticism and mythologizing, It wasn't as pretty as we like to think, or were taught to think when I was a lad in short pants, And I found his methodology so fascinating that I opted to buy the new book even before finishing this one, Mind you, the granular can get a bit grainy at times, especially for listening to in car, unable to stop and reread passages on evolution of representative gov't or market economics in Colonial times, but never at expense of the big picture, or
in this case, the lcal picture of life in Concord, as microcosm of big picture.
Whether yeoman, slave, merchant, wealthy landowner, pastor, Tory or Whig, Gross really brings these folks to life, following several of them for many years, They form a fascinating story, not just a compilation of statistics in social analysis, The biggest thing that sticks with me is how thorny family relations could be when it came to fathers distributing increasingly small and worn out plots of land to sons, and the precarious odds of children striking out on their own with no inheritance, migrating "West," which often meant "just" a few miles distance but back then might as well have been another country female children, with no such rights at all, had it even worse.
And the practice of "warning out," whereby local sheriff could force undesirables vagrants, the poor, exdebtor's prison inmates, often former successful farmers or merchants fallen on hard times , anyone not able to pull their weight and contribute to financial welfare of town coffers to move on.
Some of these folks got caught in a loop, moving from one town or village to another until they ended up back home, humiliated and not welcomed by community they'd been forced to leave in the first place.
. All of this background provides a much richer and more nuanced portrait of the famous "Minutemen" than what I learned in grade school,
Despite the drawback of difficulty following some thick details, the audio provides two major benefits: excellent narration and new Afterword by Gross, in which he describes his own evolution as a historian in taking up methods of social history.
/starts. Very interesting book that leads the reader to enjoy the eb and flow of the common people as they go from deference to activist and back over and over throughout the development of the Revolution.
Gross does well to make his scope broad enough to show the changes that occur in Concord, while maintaining his focus on the Minutemen and the development of the American Character through the American Revolution.
Perfect for someone with a basic understanding of the revolution to make a more personal, empirical connection to what actually happened to lead to the Revolution, Slow at some points and contradictory within the same pages at points, but serves to make his point that the development of a Concordian identity was a turbulent process of various power struggles.
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