Surrendering at Yorktown, the fifers for the beaten British Army played "The World Turned Upside Down." It was an appropriate tune - in seven years of war, the Americans could barely claim even three military victories of any consequence. But the British could no longer sustain their efforts. They had more urgent battles to fight in Europe and they had no more money and lives to spend quelling a rebellion that, thanks to blunder after blunder, they could never quite finish off. But history is written by the winners, and in the two hundred years since the Revolution, a web of myth and legend has grown up around the struggle, glorifying it beyond recognition. John Tebbel set out to get as close as possible to the truth about how this country was born and what its people were like on both sides. He helps the reader discover why the Revolution was by far the most unpopular war this nation ever fought, and in some ways the most savage. From this perspective, the Revolution turns out to be like other wars - not a glorious, high-minded struggle, but one (for both sides) in which initial enthusiasm quickly fades, the gap between soldiers and citizens widens, and the distance between illusion and reality becomes ever greater. Yet the Revolution produced authentic heroes and a cast of other characters that would dwarf any Hollywood extravaganza for sheer variety, if nothing more. The War for Independence was a unique event in our history, one that deserves to be understood much better if we are to understand ourselves as a people and a nation.

A Note to the Reader: The Vitality of the Revolution : 1768-1775 : The Boston Massacre -- Or Was It? -- 1773 -- Boston Has a Tea Party -- 1775 -- The Revolution Begins -- Blood on Breed's Hill : 1775-1776 : Boston Besieged -- Two Roads to Quebec -- 1776 -- How We Lost Long Island -- How We Lost New York -- and Much Else -- 1777 -- The Fall of Johnny Burgoyne -- Two Roads to Philadelphia -- 1778 -- Times That Try Men's Souls -- The British in Philadelphia -- 1778-1779 : Other Fronts, Other Battles -- 1779 -- The Year of Indecision -- 1780 -- Two Roads to Yorktown: The Road from the North -- Two Roads to Yorktown: The Road from the South -- 1781 -- Moving Toward the Climax: The War in the South -- Moving Toward the Climax: The War in the North -- Yorktown -- 1781-1783 -- Winding Down.