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    Revolution Song: A Story of American Freedom
    Revolution Song: A Story of American Freedom
    Revolution Song: A Story of American Freedom
    Audiobook18 hours

    Revolution Song: A Story of American Freedom

    Written by Russell Shorto

    Narrated by Russell Shorto

    4.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    From the author of the acclaimed history The Island at the Center of the World, an intimate new epic of the American Revolution that reinforces its meaning for today. With America's founding principles being debated today as never before, Russell Shorto looks back to the era in which those principles were forged. Drawing on new sources, he weaves the lives of six people into a seamless narrative that casts fresh light on the range of experience in colonial America on the cusp of revolution. While some of the protagonists-a Native American warrior, a British aristocrat, George Washington-play major roles on the field of battle, others-a woman, a slave, and a laborer-struggle no less valiantly to realize freedom for themselves. Through these lives we understand that the Revolution was, indeed, 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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateNov 7, 2017
    ISBN9781501971037
    Revolution Song: A Story of American Freedom
    Author

    Russell Shorto

    Russell Shorto is a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine and the director of the John Adams Institute in Amsterdam. As an author he has won the Washington Irving Prize and the New York City Book Award. His books include the bestselling The Island at the Center of the World, Gospel Truth, and Descartes’ Bones. In 2009, he was named a Knight in the Order of Orange-Nassau by the Dutch government for his contributions to the study of Holland’s role in American history.     

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    Reviews for Revolution Song

    4.5/5

    17 ratings3 reviews

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    • 4/5
      This history of the American Revolution is in fact the parallel biographies of six individuals whose lives came in contact with the war and the underlying ideologies of American independence.  I really like this approach to writing history because while it is unwieldy to attempt a comprehensive history of the American Revolution, by focusing on six individuals you get a better sense of how the war affected different kinds of people.  And as Short tells their entire life stories we get a lot of detail beyond just the 8 years of the war of their lives before and after the conflict.  Finally, we also get to see how these six historical figures dealt with the ideals and challenges of freedom.  I should add, and Shorto makes this explicitly clear, that these six individuals are not representatives of greater populations but simply their own American Revolution stories.The six subjects of Revolution Song are:
      • George Washington - The most obvious figure of the story of the American Revolution, and yet Shorto is able to get beneath the "great general and first President" story to get an understanding of a many struggling to find his place in society and the opportunities that military leadership bring.
      • Venture Smith - Born in modern-day Ghana as Broteer Furro, Venture Smith was kidnapped as a child and sold into slavery, eventually living in servitude in Rhode Island, New York, and Connecticut.  Venture purchased his freedom and that of his wife and children and became a successful farmer in Connecticut. One of his son's would serve in Washington's army during the war. His A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, a Native of Africa: But Resident above Sixty Years in the United States of America was one of the first published slave narratives.
      • George Germain - The only figure in the book who never set foot in the Americas is George Germain, 1st Viscount Sackville.  Having been court martialed during the Seven Years War, he was disgraced in aristocratic circles.  Nevertheless he was a favorite of King George III and was able to claw his way into politics and get appointed Secretary of State for the American Department. His aggressive approach to attempting to suppress the rebellion and lack of familiarity of the reality of the situation in the colonies is blamed for the British failure in the war.
      • Cornplanter - The chief warrior for the Seneca people who fought in both the French & Indian War and the Revolution allied with the British forces. He and his people suffered greatly when General Washington instructed Major General John Sullivan to carry out a scorched earth campaign destroying Iroquois Six Nation villages throughout New York. After the war, Cornplanter protested against the Treaty of Paris ceding Iroquois land to the United States that had never been under control of Britain, and met with President Washington in person in 1790.
      • Abraham Yates - A revolutionary lawyer and politician from Albany, Yates took a more radical position on individual liberty and mistrust of government.  He became a rival to Alexander Hamilton and a staunch opponent of Federalism and the Constitution.
      • Margaret Moncrieffe - The only woman in this book, Margaret Moncrieffe was a child when the Revolution started living in New York as the daughter of a British officer.  Her father arranged her marriage to the cruel British Lieutenant John Coghlan although she was in love with Aaron Burr. After moving to Britain, she separated from her husband and found a measure of independence as the mistress of several prominent men in Britain and Europe.
      I think the stories of Venture Smith, Cornplanter, and Margaret Moncrieff are the most interesting since they are the type of people that don't appear in histories that focus on military and political leaders.  Nevertheless, the whole book reads very well and is an interesting addition to Revolutionary War historical studies.
    • 5/5
      I enjoyed this a great deal—Shorto follows a number of people around the Revolution, including an Iroquois war/peace leader; a New York politician who was ultimately an antifederalist (and whose worries about presidential power sound pretty prescient, although Shorto himself selected those quotes in the past year or so, so no surprise there); a young British woman whose attempts at freedom didn’t end up well for her; an enslaved and then free man trying to carve out a life in the North; a British lord; and George Washington. Each of these people interacted with at least one of the others (mostly George Washington), with the exception of the African-turned-American who went by Venture Smith; the closest Shorto gets is that Smith could have gone to see Washington at one particular point where Washington was nearby and publicly feted, but there is no evidence one way or the other (and he didn’t seem like the type to go watch politicians). He successfully gets across the many ways in which the Revolution did, and didn’t, change things for various people.
    • 5/5
      Russell Shorto never fails to deliver stories that drop you in the middle of history with sights, sounds, emotions and humanity that render you unable to put the book down. Through written records including legal records, journals and book publications (as well as other sources), we attend the weddings, births and funerals, understand the probable motivations accompanying the legal infighting and intrigue, and see that our sugar-coated version of the American Revolution as taught in schools was seriously deficient.I always say that if southerners are still fighting the Civil War, Northerners (more precisely northeasterners) are still fighting the Revolution. We grew up with the battlegrounds, graves and monuments all around us and we went to school with the descendants of patriots. Even having been to or lived around many of the sites of history, I gained a new appreciation for details that were previously not touched on by many chroniclers. Having researched George Washington’s early life as it intersected with other southern families in my genealogical research. I was aware of his failures and shortcomings as an American “hero”. The author provides us with fascinating portraits of the characters, an indispensable map and a meticulous bibliography. By bringing in five lesser-known characters in the drama, as well as showing us the George Washington and his family that we thought we knew, Shorto brings the pain and struggle, fears and hopes into sharp focus. There are the elites, the Livingstons, Jays, and Johnsons familiar to New Yorkers as well as our Native elites, Joseph Brant, Molly Jemison and Red Jacket travelling through the pages, playing their parts in the story. His characters are as diverse as America.Somewhat chilling was the life-long warning of Abraham Yates to be wary of the Federalists who might wish to take too much power away from the states, concentrating it in the hands of the central government. His opponent was today’s hero on Broadway, Alexander Hamilton. After Yates’ death, George Washington, perhaps with Yates in mind, gave his Farewell Address to an adoring crowd, leaving us with this to ponder for the next two hundred or so years:“The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries, which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty.”Since it is the fourth of July today, and the weather is nice, it might be a good day for me to pay my respects to some of the people who brought us all here today. Thanks to my ancestors, the Native Americans, the British Loyalists, the American Patriots, the French Huguenots, the Dutch colonists, and others I may have overlooked for whatever small or large contribution they made. Thanks also to Russell Shorto for getting us excited about our collective history once again.