In this audacious recasting of the American Revolution, distinguished historian Gary Nash offers a profound new way of thinking about the struggle to create this country, introducing readers to a coalition of patriots from all classes and races of American society. From millennialist preachers to enslaved Africans, disgruntled women to aggrieved Indians, the people so vividly portrayed in this book did not all agree or succeed, but during the exhilarating and messy years of this country's birth, they laid down ideas that have become part of our inheritance and ideals toward which we still strive today. "Tightly though densely written, this expertly researched tome shakes the "stainless steel" history of the American Revolution to its core." — Publishers Weekly   "You will never think about the Revolution in the same way." — Alfred F. Young , author of Masquerade: The Life and Times of Deborah Sampson, Continental Soldier "What Nash does in The Unknown American Revolution is dislodge the founding fathers to give the dynamism of urban craftsmen, slaves, ‘dockside tars,' and ‘club-wielding farmers' a more prominent place in the history of the movement."  — The Boston Globe "A unique and captivating interpretation of American independence, and one that is more democratic than traditional histories of the period." Chicago Tribune "What Nash does in The Unknown American Revolution is dislodge the founding fathers to give the dynamism of urban craftsmen, slaves, dockside tars, and club-wielding farmers a more prominent place in the history of the movement." The Boston Globe Gary B. Nash is professor of history at UCLA and director of the National Center for History in the Schools. He is the former president of the Organization of American Historians, co-chair of the National History Standards Project, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.