In his meticulously researched, beautifully calibrated Liberty Is Sweet, historian Woody Holton adds necessary nuance, building on...stories previously marginalized (or invisible) in our narrative of the nation's birth while illuminating a collective yearning to form a more perfect union.

Holton is a proficient and tireless researcher who, using his own findings and those of others, presents fresh appraisals of important developments based on lives and events long condemned to obscurity.

By widening the scope of what he looks at, Holton delivers a much more interesting and complicated story than the traditional legend of the nation’s founding.

A great strength of Liberty Is Sweet is that it refuses to paint either the colonists or the British Empire as simple villains or victims.

... the opposite of the narrow caricature Adams imagined. It is a sweeping narrative history of the Revolution that attempts to include everyone—slave and free, men and women, prosperous businessmen and indebted farmers, immigrants and Native Americans—into a single story of different people struggling for freedom.

... an ambitious if sprawling survey.

Holton's detailed account, spanning from 1763 to 1795, reveals little-known factors that gradually transformed resistance into rebellion, and complexities of military decisions and encounters gone wrong and of the war's far-reaching and enduring aftermath.

Historian Holton...has specifically set out to tell not just the economic and political history of the American Revolution. His deeper goal includes how the Revolution was shaped by not only the continent’s previous inhabitants, but also by the dream of liberty of the thousands of enslaved people who had been transported across the Atlantic from Africa.

... sweeping.

A thoroughgoing work of scholarship.