Books like Patriots by A. J. Langguth

A compelling overview of American history through the eyes and experiences of its women, workers, African Americans, Native Americans, immigrants, and the working poor.

David McCullough’s *1776* chronicles the human drama surrounding the American Revolution’s pivotal year, tracing ordinary soldiers, notable leaders, and British forces as they shape the fate of the fledgling nation.

An accessible guide to world history, covering ancient civilizations to modern events in a clear, engaging style.

Christian G. Appy's monumental oral history of the Vietnam War, offering vivid testimonies from 135 men and women across the entire history of the conflict, from its origins in the 1940s to the chaotic fall of Saigon in 1975.

The American Revolution was a home-front war that brought scarcity, bloodshed, and danger into the life of every American. The author shows that women played a vital role throughout the struggle: we see women boycotting British goods in the years before independence, writing propaganda that radicalized their neighbors, raising funds for the army, and helping finance the fledgling government. We see how they managed farms, plantations, and businesses while their men went into battle, and how they served as nurses and cooks in the army camps; risked their lives carrying intelligence, participating in reconnaissance missions, or seeking personal freedom from slavery; served as spies, saboteurs, and warriors; and lived with the daily knowledge that their husbands could be hanged as traitors if the revolution did not succeed.

This book has developed from a study that was first undertaken a number of years ago, when Howard Mumford Jones, then editor-in-chief of the John Harvard Library, invited me to prepare a collection of pamphlets of the American Revolution for publication in that series. The full bibliography of pamphlets relating to the Anglo-American struggle published in the colonies through the year 1776 contains not a dozen or so items but over four hundred. In the end I concluded that no fewer than seventy-two of them ought to be re-published. But sheer numbers were not the most important measure of the magnitude of the project. The pamphlets include all sorts of writings -- treatises on political theory, essays on history, political arguments, sermons, correspondence, poems -- and they display all sorts of literary devices. But for all their variety they have in common one distinctive characteristic: they are, to an unusual degree, explanatory. They reveal not merely positions taken but the reasons why positions were taken; they review motive and understanding: the assumptions, beliefs, and ideas -- the articulated worldview -- that lay behind the manifest events of the time. As a result I found myself, as I read through these many documents, studying not simply a particular medium of publication but, through these documents, nothing less than the ideological origins of the American Revolution. - Foreword.

Ten‑year‑old Hope chronicles her daily life in 1777 Philadelphia, describing how the Redcoats threaten the city and how she supports the Continental Army. Supplemented with historical notes.