A season of youth: The American Revolution and the historical imagination

It may take a more sophisticated understanding of history to appreciate a whole book on historiography, but anyone who is more than passingly interested in the American Revolution might want to take at least a browse through Michael Kammen's well-crafted tome. I found that the book challenged me to seperate the Revolution's heady mythology from the truth for the first time. Still more valuable, perhaps, was that as I read the book, I was immersed in the hard cider and bootstraps world of the new Republic. While Kammen lapses occasionally into informal banter and has a rather odd sense of humor, it doesn't detract much from the monumental amount of work, scholarship and insight that is represented here.