Pox Americana : the great smallpox epidemic of 1775-82, by Elizabeth A. Fenn. Hill and Wang, 2001. A horrifying epidemic of smallpox was sweeping across the Americas when the American Revolution began, and yet we know almost nothing about it. Elizabeth A. Fenn is the first historian to reveal how deeply variola affected the outcome of the war in every colony and the lives of everyone in North America.
Available formats: Book
Liberty Is Sweet: The hidden history of the American Revolution, by Woody Holton. Simon and Schuster, 2021. A celebrated scholar’s history of the American Revolution, from its origins to its aftermath, which emphasizes the contributions of groups usually omitted in this story: Native Americans, African Americans, and women.
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Liberty’s Exiles: American loyalists in the revolutionary world, by Maya Jasanoff. Knopf, 2011. This surprising account of the founding of the United States and the shaping of the post-revolutionary world traces extraordinary journeys like the one of Elizabeth Johnston, a young mother from Georgia, who led her growing family to Britain, Jamaica, and Canada, questing for a home; black loyalists such as David George, who escaped from slavery in Virginia and went on to found Baptist congregations in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone; and Mohawk Indian leader Joseph Brant, who tried to find autonomy for his people in Ontario.
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Book of Ages: The life and opinions of Jane Franklin, by Jill Lepore. Knopf, 2013. From one of our most accomplished and widely admired historiansāa revelatory portrait of Benjamin Franklin’s youngest sister, Jane, whose obscurity and poverty were matched only by her brotherās fame and wealth but who, like him, was a passionate reader, a gifted writer, and an astonishingly shrewd political commentator.
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American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence, by Pauline Maier. Knopf, 1997. Pauline Maier shows us the Declaration as both the defining statement of our national identity and the moral standard by which we live as a nation. It is truly “American Scripture,” and Maier tells us how it came to be — from the Declaration’s birth in the hard and tortuous struggle by which Americans arrived at Independence to the ways in which, in the nineteenth century, the document itself became sanctified.
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