Robert A. Gross is the James L. and Shirley A. Draper Professor of Early American History Emeritus at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of The Minutemen and Their World (1976), which won the Bancroft Prize, and of Books and Libraries in Thoreau's Concord (1988); with Mary Kelley, he is the coeditor of An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790-1840 (2010). A former assistant editor of Newsweek, he has written for such periodicals as Esquire, Harper's Magazine, The Boston Globe, and The New York Times, and his essays have appeared in The American Scholar, The New England Quarterly, Raritan, and The Yale Review. His most recent book is The Transcendentalists and Their World (2021).
In this eloquent book, Robert Gross gives us a Concord that we have not encountered before, a surprising place that turns out to be not the quaint community of myth and legend, but a lively society, deeply engaged in the great issues of its revolutionary time--with all the tensions, anxieties, and aspirations that human being share. --Linda K. Kerber The Minutemen and Their World makes the American Revolution live--a vivid, compelling book that dramatizes the political consciousness and armed conflict in the very birthplace of the Revolutionary War. Few books have so brilliantly stood the test of time. --Jon Butler For historians, The Minutemen and Their World was a shot heard round the world. It taught us that fine history combines good scholarlship with good writing. Its reverberations are still being heard. --Laurel Thatcher Ulrich The Minutemen and Their World is a classic in--well, the classic sense of the world: a book of such enduring elegance and interest that it will find a readership in every generation. --Joyce Appleby A richly detailed picture of social life and social divisions in Concord, and a lively narrative of the coming of the Revolution there. --Edmund S. Morgan, The New York Review of Books This lovely little book captures, intimately and authentically, the life of an eighteenth century New England town . . . gloriously good. --Michael Zuckerman, University of Pennsylvania