The American Revolution conjures a series of iconographic images in the contemporary American imagination. In these imagined scenes, defiant Patriots fight against British Redcoats for freedom and democracy, while a unified citizenry rallies behind them and the American cause. But the lived experience of the Revolution was a more complex matter, filled with uncertainty, fear, and discord.

In The American Revolution Reborn, editors Patrick Spero and Michael Zuckerman compile essays from a new generation of multidisciplinary scholars that render the American Revolution as a time of intense ambiguity and frightening contingency.

In the first section, "Civil Wars", contributors rethink the heroic terms of Revolutionary-era allegiance and refute the idea of patriotic consensus. In the following section, "Wider Horizons", essayists destabilize the historiographical inevitability of America as a nation. The studies gathered in the third section, "New Directions", present new possibilities for scholarship on the American Revolution. And the last section, titled "Legacies", collects essays that deal with the long afterlife of the Revolution and its effects on immigration, geography, and international politics.

The book is published by University of Pennsylvania Press.

"This is the most ambitious state-of-the-field collection published since the American Revolution's bicentennial. .. lively and wide-ranging collection of essays." - Alan Taylor, author of American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804

"A state-of-the-field collection. Its essays rank among the best Revolutionary scholarship." - Benjamin H. Irvin, University of Arizona

"The essays in this volume are careful, thought-provoking, and highly effective." - Andrew Shankman, Rutgers University-Camden