“Stupid books.” – Bart Simpson
Howdy! This is the homepage for the on-line preview of my book We Kicked Their Ass: A New and Better History of the American Revolution. This website is still very much under renovation but it’s already June 3rd and the big (albeit very sour) 250th for the 4th of July is just four weeks away. That means I need to start my preview countdown posts whether the site is ready (it’s not!) or the book is finished (it isn’t!).
Every Wednesday and Saturday until the Fourth I’ll be posting a section from the first two chapters. Chapter 1 has four sections and Chapter 2 has six, for a total of ten, starting today (Wednesday June 3) and ending Saturday, July 4th, 2026. You’ll get the first map this Saturday, and there’s usually a map or illustration every other section.
Nothing is for sale yet, but there is an email submission box for those who would like to be notified when the finished book is locked for printing and ready to order. The goal is to keep the price to $30(US) and start shipping by Thanksgiving, but those are not certainties, so for now it’s email addresses instead of pre-orders (though an impressive email list will help with the printer).
For the record: I will not sell or give your email to anyone. I’m selling books not data.
If you’d like the brief tale of how my book came to this most indie of indie publishing, please see the announcement post. Otherwise, let’s start the show!
– Charlie
Preface – USA! USA!
“God has a Special Providence for fools, children, and the United States of America.” – Otto von Bismark (popular misquote)
Assholes always want to be in charge. From the dawn of civilization and the first organized societies, this has presented a problem for everybody else.
The American Revolution was an anti-asshole event of unprecedented scale and success. It is a wondrous tale; the super short version is that the aforementioned assholes finally went too far, causing a bunch of backwater nobodies to: 1) tell them off, then 2) kick them out. Hoping to take advantage of free publicity around the 250th anniversary of these events, this book recounts the story for fun and profit.
Reverently capitalized then and now, the Revolution killed a tremendous number of people, tore up the map of the world, and smashed assumptions about power and legitimacy that had reigned since time immemorial. In eight short years, the world’s two rising superpowers battled each other to exhaustion*; a devastating smallpox epidemic scoured the entire hemisphere; and cap-H History took a sudden hard left at the victorious rebellion of a continental republic that counted the people as sovereign and – gasp and horror – had no king.
(*The winning superpower bankrupted itself paying for the war, finally going broke six years later, ringing in the considerably messier Révolution.)
From two-and-a-half centuries in their future, we can easily forget how shocking and improbable the whole thing was. A few high ideals, some self serving ambition, and plenty of drunk talk had somehow escalated into the creation of the United States of America, the magnificent anachronism: the freest country in the world, where every ninth person was enslaved; an instant empire that had no emperor; a baby giant – already half the size of Europe – with one foot in the bright democratic future and another chained to the lordly horrors of the past.
People were telling and retelling the Revolutionary story before the war was even over, arguing about why it happened and what it meant. The republic it spawned now stands at the quarter millennia mark; but fifty years after the first shots were fired, as the last members of the Revolutionary generation were dying off, one veteran of the Battle of Concord summed it up tidily for a historian:
“Young man, what we meant in going for those redcoats was this: we always had governed ourselves, and we always meant to. They didn’t mean we should.”{1}
Author’s Note
“Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, contrary to what you’ve just seen, war is neither glamorous nor fun. There are no winners, only losers. There are no good wars, with the following exceptions: The American Revolution, World War II, and the Star Wars trilogy.” – Bart Simpson
Telling stories out of school is always a little dangerous, so I’d like to briefly lay down a few ground rules about how this particular one is going to unfold. First, I am not a historian and this is not an academic history, so no complaining about colorful metaphors and jocular characterizations that wouldn’t pass muster in a thesis, dissertation, or textbook. This is fun and factual history, not loquacious academy history where an entire page might suffocate under one gargantuan paragraph and its unbroken stream of caveats and sub-clauses.
Source citations are numbered in curly brackets {1,2,3…} and listed at the end of each chapter. Asterisks* denote parenthetical asides that can be skipped until after the current paragraph or read in line, whichever you prefer.
(*Like this.)
Second, we’re going to be swearing. Telling the story of the American Revolution without the full American vocabulary is fucking bullshit. The Revolution was fought against an empire that turned gentility into genocide on multiple continents; it would be disrespectful of me to do this daintily, but I promise to keep things (generally) tasteful and appropriate.
Finally, and most importantly, I ask your grace on my tangents and digressions. The Revolution was two-hundred-and-fifty years ago; if we assume twenty-five years for a generation, then each of us alive today had over a thousand ancestors running around at this time, some of them awesome people, a few real monsters, and most just making do.
But our thousand grandmas and grandpas lived in a ye olde world that’s not intuitive to our miracle filled time. Theirs was the last age of pre-industry, when books and printing were plentiful, but light came from candles, everything was made by hand, and no vaccines meant that half of all people died as children. Then as now, they hated their insurance companies and distrusted their bankers (then as now, they came by it honest), but court cases turned on whether or not rat damage was covered if the ship didn’t have a good enough cat.{2} Trade connected the globe, but it moved by sail; while muscle (human and animal) fed and powered the world. So I’d like you to follow me down some contextual rabbit holes to better explain a time when so many of our unthinking assumptions don’t apply.
The American Revolution is hard to know. There aren’t any photographs, nor recordings or films. It is silent and invisible save through the written word, some surviving sites and artifacts, and a few paintings that were done with first hand knowledge or testimony. But the writing is in a script and style that is barely legible to a modern reader; the sites and artifacts are few and far between; and the paintings were (mostly) done to flatter rich people.
In light of all that, please indulge me when I take things off course to sightsee, fill in the blanks, or goof off. Thank you and enjoy.
Charlie
(P.S. Sorry not sorry, grammar folks.)
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{1 – Morison, Samuel Eliot; The Oxford History of the American People, p212-213}
{2 – Farber, Hannah; Underwriters of the United States, p20, a ship captain once brought his cats to court to win an insurance claim dispute}
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Continue to Chapter 1 – Lexington: The Last Argument of Kings