The Minutemen and Their World
25th anniversary edition

Last week I was on a walk with my wife and father-in-law while visiting her family in Massachusetts. It was in that no man land in the calendar between Christmas and New Year's. Maybe it was the rush between Thanksgiving and Christmas, or Christmas Day landing in the middle of the week this year, bu......more

A surprisingly intimate and well-written history of the personal stresses that put the average minuteman's finger on the trigger just before the shot heard 'round the world. One kernel that's kind of (maybe scarily) relevant for today: By the time you start fighting to protect the world you know, th......more

This is an old classic, that somehow I got through grad school without reading. I think it was because the field has generally moved past these old social history "town studies," and so I had to be generally aware of them, but nobody made me actually read them. But then this was advertised to me as......more

An interesting social history of Concord, MA during the Revolution. I was surprised it was not a military history (almost at all)--there 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 espec......more

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 hyper-local level. Just brilliantly done.......more