When people ask me, a son of the Deep South, why I root for the Red Sox, my usual answer is that I began wearing their hat decades ago because I liked the look of it, and then they went and won a world series for the first time in eighty years so I had to keep following them. That’s ..true, and part of the affection, but as a history-addled child I loved reading about the Revolution, and Boston has inarguable pride of place there. The revolution without Boston is France without Paris. It was there that Hancock, Dr. Warren, and the Adams cousins crafted resentment into rebellion and revolution — there that British soldiers first faced off against their American subjects, and not far from there that the first shots were fired at Lexington and Concord. Boston in the American Revolution is an informal history of the Hub City’s role in the Revolution, one that often addresses the reader directly and ends each chapter with almost a bit of tour-guide content. Photos of the prominent places mentioned are included, with instructions on how to find them and added information like “This isn’t actually where the Boston Massacre happened, but it’s close enough you won’t get run over here.” These highlighted sites are all part of “The Freedom Trail”.

The book is also an anti-mythic history, as it demonstrates that a lot of Boston patriots were…um, a bit unhinged. Not the aforementioned men, but Bostonians had a tendency of clustering into mobs, chasing men they did not like into their homes , throwing whatever they could find at the house and into the windows, and then retreating back into taverns after the object of their rage started shooting at them. We hear in popular stories of the Boston Massacre, but not of the Rope-Makers drama which is almost hysterical: a British soldier inquires at a rope-making place if they need any extra hands, because he’s paid practically nothing; he’s insulted and gets in a fist-fight in with the insulter and loses. He comes back with friends, a brawl ensues, the Brits lose. They come back with dozens of friends, they get in a brawl, they lose. Some of these same rope-makers would be in the Boston Massacre crowd squaring off against and antagonizing British soldiers! The amount of violence leading up to the Revolution — a decade before 1776 — was surprising to me, in part because histories of the Revolution tend to highlight a few key moments and then blur the years together, so that readers are left thinking this was a sudden eruption of conflict, and not a steadily-boiling pot of the same that finally began roiling in 1776. It reminds me a bit of the sectional crisis that came to a head nearly a century later, but which had slowly been percolating since the 1820s. I also found it interesting to learn that part of Britain’s slow resistance to armed rebellion was the fact that Thomas Gage had been under-reporting rebel sentiment for years to make it appear as though he was managing things better than he actually was.

Although the book was quite entertaining, I did raise my eyebrows a few times: the author describes Bunker Hill as the war’s bloodiest battle (…maybe by the rate of British casualties, 40%, but by no other metric), and is ocasionally much too informal, once adding a ‘Meow’ comment to a quotation in which General Washington dismisses the haggard-looking officers of the Continental Army. I could see this working very well for someone who is planning a visit to Bahston, and I enjoyed the close focus on the town itself, but I can reccommend it only with caution.

Some of the Best Acting Ever