The myth and the reality of Ethan Allen and the much-loved Green Mountain Boys of Vermont—a “surprising and interesting new account…useful, informative reexamination of an often-misunderstood aspect of the American Revolution” ( Booklist ). In the “highly recommended” ( Library Journal ) Those Turbulent Sons of Freedom , Wren overturns the myth of Ethan Allen as a legendary hero of the American Revolution and a patriotic son of Vermont and offers a different portrait of Allen and his Green Mountain Boys. They were ruffians who joined the rush for cheap land on the northern frontier of the colonies in the years before the American Revolution. Allen did not serve in the Continental Army but he raced Benedict Arnold for the famous seizure of Britain’s Fort Ticonderoga. Allen and Arnold loathed each other. General George Washington, leery of Allen, refused to give him troops. In a botched attempt to capture Montreal against specific orders of the commanding American general, Allen was captured in 1775 and shipped to England to be hanged. Freed in 1778, he spent the rest of his time negotiating with the British but failing to bring Vermont back under British rule. “A worthy addition to the canon of works written about this fractious period in this country’s history” ( Addison County Independent ), this is a groundbreaking account of an important and little-known front of the Revolutionary War, of George Washington (and his good sense), and of a major American myth. Those Turbulent Sons of Freedom is an “engrossing” ( Publishers Weekly ) and essential contribution to the history of the American Revolution. Christopher S. Wren retired from The New York Times after nearly twenty-nine years as a reporter, foreign correspondent, and editor. He headed the Times ’ news bureaus in Moscow, Cairo, Beijing, Ottawa, and Johannesburg; covered the United Nations; and reported from the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the Middle East, China, Southeast Asia, Africa, South America, and Canada. He taught at Princeton University before coming to Dartmouth, where he is visiting professor in its Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program. He is the author of Those Turbulent Sons of Freedom . Those Turbulent Sons of Freedom ONE A Land Rush North It was the lure of cheap land that drew pioneers like Ethan Allen, Seth Warner, and Justus Sherwood to leave Connecticut in one of the first great migrations in colonial New England. The virgin wilderness of the New Hampshire Grants, as Vermont was once called, attracted farmers from across Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York, where their fathers’ fields had become unaffordable or parceled among too many sons. Some were religious separatists rejecting the Calvinist dogmas and taxes imposed by established Protestant churches to follow the “new light” of a spiritual Great Awakening across New England. These pilgrim settlers brought their children and households on horseback through the woods from Massachusetts, following native trails too narrow for a cart. What limited their numbers were the hardships of daily life on the northern frontier. Winters ran wicked cold, with blinding blizzards and avalanches of ice. Bloodsucking gnats and mosquitoes infested the humid summers. Rattlesnakes coiled among the rocks. Wolves stalked the shadows. Hacking a plot from such dense forest demanded backbreaking toil from dawn to dusk. And a screaming catamount, the fiercest predator, could vault a split-rail fence and destroy a homesteader’s livestock and livelihood in seconds. Misfits in colonial society, whether hell-raisers, fugitives, or down on their luck like Ethan Allen, found an outlet for their frustrations in the vast backcountry of the Grants, so named for several million acres that New Hampshire’s colonial governor, Benning Wentworth, granted for settlement between 1749 and 1764. The Crown encouraged governors like Wentworth to attract immigrants by offering them land to clear and cultivate. Land in eighteenth-century America was wealth for the taking. In a colonial society without banks or negotiable credit, property was the route to social status in an ostensibly classless society. Speculators vied to buy and flip grants for profit. Where fortunes could be made, rascals and mischief followed. The hierarchy of self-interest extended upward to Governor Wentworth, who grew rich on the commissions and fees he charged and the five hundred prime acres he reserved for himself in each township he created. He would charter and sell off nearly three million acres in 135 such townships, from the Connecticut River to Lake Champlain, until he ran out of land. The first he named after himself, Bennington. Once the sun dropped below the rim of surrounding hills, Wentworth’s paper townships plunged into pitch-blackness lit only by moonlight, the firefly flicker of campfires, and glowing cabin hearths. The journey was best undertaken in late winter, when the trammeled