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In this highly acclaimed book, Charles Royster explores the mental processes and emotional crises that Americans faced in their first national war. He ranges imaginatively outside the traditional techniques of analytical historical exposition to build his portrait of how individuals and a populace at large faced the Revolution and its implications.

Charles Royster, Boyd Professor of History at Louisiana State University, is the author of The Fabulous History of the Dismal Swamp Company: A Story of George Washington's Times, Light-Horse Harry Lee and the Legacy of the American Revolution, and The Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans, which received the Bancroft Prize, the Lincoln Prize, and the Charles S. Sydnor Award in Southern History.

The John D. Rockefeller III Award (1979)
Silver Medal, California Book Award, Commonwealth Club (1980)
The Fraunces Tavern Museum Book Award (1980)
The National Historical Society Book Prize, National Historical Society (1981)
The Francis Parkman Prize, Society of American Historians (1981)

"Represents a quantum leap in our understanding of the Revolution. . . . [The book] is social history, intellectual history, institutional history, political history, and not any single one of them, which is to say that it is good history."
--Edmund S. Morgan, New Republic

"To a far greater extent than is true of most historical monographs, it is a work of art. . . . No student of early American history should miss it."
--Journal of Southern History