... refreshing.

Ms. Norton does not fundamentally challenge the traditional trajectory of events in that decisive year. What she does do is enrich the narrative, filling in the story with a staggering amount of detail based on prodigious research in an enormous number of archives. She doesn’t just tell us how many pounds of tea the East India Co. placed on seven ships sailing to Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Charleston, S.C. in late 1773, but she describes the kind of tea that was sent...Some readers might think this is specification run wild.

Norton brings that 16-month period vividly alive in her meticulously documented and richly rewarding 1774.

History is most certainly told by the winners, but contemporary newspaper accounts, letters, and sermons provide the narratives not told in our modern textbooks. The story of the Boston Tea Party, passed down throughout American history, is brought into the light as a multifaceted, controversial event. This laying out of detailed facts concerning everything from the aforementioned tea-dumping to the First Continental Congress encourages readers to question previous assumptions. Norton quotes firsthand accounts and draws on her long history of Loyalist scholarship to underline that what now seems an inevitable page in American history was not always so clear, and the past that we harken back to is sometimes all too similar to our present day..

Norton’s cogent discussion of the details of the 'long year' will appeal to colonial and revolutionary period scholars and enthusiasts. Her inclusion of suppressed female and loyalist voices should be applauded..

... deeply researched, occasionally plodding.

... meticulous and persuasive.