Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America

"It’s a wonderfully readable book, focused on individual leaders. If you want to know how the Revolution occurred, this is a good book to start with. I think that’s true. He shows how various individuals contributed to the Revolution. The Revolution was not just the work of a few, it was the work of a whole society. The Declaration of Independence, which is what we celebrate on the Fourth of July, is America’s saving grace because it is what holds us together. We’re a nation of many different people. We have no common ethnicity. We have no common religion. We have no common race. So, we need to keep honoring the one thing we have in common. President Abraham Lincoln recognized, in an 1858 speech, that belief in the self-evident truths, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” is what makes us, as the first sentence of the declaration says, “one people.” We’ve got to celebrate that oneness, otherwise we’ll cease to be one nation altogether."