1775

What if the year we have long commemorated as America's defining moment was in fact misleading? What if the real events that signaled the historic shift from colony to country took place earlier, and that the true story of our nation's emergence reveals a more complicated -- and divisive -- birth process? In this major new work, iconoclastic historian and political chronicler Kevin Phillips upends the conventional reading of the American Revolution by puncturing the myth that 1776 was the struggle's watershed year. Mythology and omission have elevated 1776, but the most important year, rarely recognized, was 1775: the critical launching point of the war and Britain's imperial outrage and counterattack and the year during which America's commitment to revolution took bloody and irreversible shape. Phillips focuses on the great battlefields and events of 1775 -- Congress's warlike economic ultimatums to king and parliament, New England's rage militaire, the panicked concentration of British troops in militant but untenable Boston, the stunning expulsion of royal governors up and down the seaboard, and the new provincial congresses and many hundreds of local committees that quickly re