Russell Shorto

Harvard Book Store welcomes author, historian, and journalist RUSSELL SHORTO—best-selling author of The Island at the Center of the World—for a discussion of his latest book, Revolution Song: A Story of American Freedom. This event is co-sponsored by Mass Humanities.

About Revolution Song

In his epic new book, Russell Shorto takes us back to the founding of the American nation, drawing on diaries, letters and autobiographies to flesh out six lives that cast the era in a fresh new light. They include an African man who freed himself and his family from slavery, a rebellious young woman who abandoned her abusive husband to chart her own course and a certain Mr. Washington, who was admired for his social graces but harshly criticized for his often-disastrous military strategy.

Through these lives we understand that the revolution was fought over the meaning of individual freedom, a philosophical idea that became a force for violent change. A powerful narrative and a brilliant defense of American values, Revolution Song makes the compelling case that the American Revolution is still being fought today and that its ideals are worth defending.

Praise

“How did the teenaged daughter of a British officer view the American Revolution, from behind enemy lines in New York? What did that contest mean to a shrewd, contemplative Iroquois warrior? Russell Shorto has emerged from the archives with a bold, largely neglected cast. He has set them free in a rich, prismatic narrative, as intensely vivid as it is seamlessly constructed.” —Stacy Schiff, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Witches: Salem, 1692

“With symphonic sweep, cinematic detail and compelling, superbly researched real-life characters, Shorto shows how our struggle for freedom began and why it remains so sadly unfinished. If Spielberg wrote history, this is how it would read.” —Howard Fineman, NBC News analyst and author of The Thirteen American Arguments

“An engaging, readable and surprisingly complete account of the American Revolution. A tour de force.” —Gordon S. Wood, author of The Radicalism of the American Revolution

“Russell Shorto has long had an astonishing talent for adjusting the focus in ways that make familiar swaths of history seem intriguingly foreign and fresh. With Revolution Song, he’s worked his magic again. Through his vigorous language, his mastery of archival sources and the pleasing interweave of his six carefully chosen characters, Shorto has composed a powerful polyphonic story, simultaneously grand and intimate, that makes us hear (and see and feel) the tumult of our nation’s founding as never before.” —Hampton Sides, New York Times best-selling author of In the Kingdom of Ice