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In 1763 the thirteen British colonies of North America were among the freest and most prosperous places on earth, proud to be part of the empire that had just won a world war. Twenty years later they had broken with that empire, defeated its army and navy, and founded a republic unlike anything the modern world had seen.This is the whole sweep of that astonishing story - the long quarrel over taxes and rights that turned loyal Britons into rebels; the shot on Lexington Green and the eight brutal years of war that followed; the winter the cause nearly died in the mud of New Jersey; the miracle at Saratoga that brought France into the fight and made a colonial rebellion into a global war; the vicious civil war in the Carolina backcountry; and the trap that closed on a British army at Yorktown. It does not end at the surrender, because winning the war was only half the Revolution: the harder half came after, when the victors nearly threw it all away, then gathered in Philadelphia to write the constitution that governs them still.Clear, vivid, and honest about what the Revolution achieved and what it left unfinished - the liberty it proclaimed and the slavery it preserved, the equality it promised and the people it excluded - this is narrative history at its most gripping: the unforgettable account of how a handful of quarrelsome provinces decided they would rather risk everything than be governed without their consent, and remade the world in the doing.