"I want to commend the author for working into the narrative at multiple points the violence and civil war qualities that pervaded the conflict. In particular, the violence endemic in the southern theater was ferocious and the author has captured that quite evocatively. Well done." --Sally Hadden, Western Michigan University "Griffin has ably created a synthesis uniting the disparate issues of sovereignty, 'Britishness', republican virtue, western land hunger, Native cultures, mob actions, female agency, constitution-drafting and revolutionary military conflicts into a relatively seamless whole. Few other authors have tackled so many topics successfully." --David Porter, Northern Virginia Community College "I'm excited by this manuscript; I value its broad focus-the ice-choked Illinois backcountry, transnational conceptions of empire-and its willingness to baldly state the many meanings of the American Revolution-citizenship for some, enslavement for African Americans, and removal for Native Americans and Loyalists. Griffin's welding together of views informed by Neo-Whig, Neo-Imperial, and Neo-Progressive scholarship succeeds in producing a narrative from multiple perspectives." --Edward Crowther, Adams State College "This beautiful narrative tells a compelling and complex story about the North American people who were trying to make sense of the chaos that war and revolution unleashed on them.

It tells a mix of stories and presents a bottom-up approach, critical to students' understanding of how life was lived in the past." --Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai, East Tennessee State University "Better than any previous text I can call to mind, Griffin weaves together a narrative of the Revolutionary Era with the British background, the struggles of different groups of Americans, and some deep thinking about the nature of authority. Griffin offers a great deal of fresh thinking about the period, and has written a book that is comprehensive, insightful, and deeply satisfying." --Ben Carp, Tufts University "Patrick Griffin provides a masterful account of the American Revolution. He weaves the experiences of ordinary people into a compelling narrative of political change. The book not only recovers the voices of winners and losers, patriots and loyalists, planters and slaves, and Native Americans and frontier settlers, but also offers original insights into how Americans defined and redefined the power of the state in their daily lives."--T.H.

Breen,Northwestern University "Patrick Griffin's group portraits of the men and women who made the Revolution show that the transformation of British subjects into American citizens did not follow a preordained script. As British sovereignty collapsed, patriots sought to rally their self-sovereign, would-be countrymen to the cause of independence. The tortuous quest for the reconstruction of sovereignty shaped an emerging American identity that justified-and disguised-a new distribution of power and a new, more democratic yet more exclusionary social order. The picture that Griffin presents is not always a pretty one. But America's Revolution gives us a much better sense of how we got to be who we are today than do the simplistic, quasi-mythic narratives of our beginnings, whether celebratory or critical, that continue to shape our national self-understanding."--Peter S. Onuf,University of Virginia "In this boldly argued and wide-ranging history of the origins of the U.S.

, Patrick Griffin takes familiar stories about the expansion of liberty and transforms them into unfamiliar stories about the expansion of state power. America's Revolution, he suggests, was less about collective resistance to entrenched authority than the establishment of effective imperial authority in eastern North America."--Andrew Cayton,Miami University.