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 during the American Revolution.

T.H. Breen is the William Smith Mason Professor of American History at Northwestern University. An authority on the culture and politics of the early Atlantic World, he has written six major books, including Tobacco Culture and Imagining the Past.