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"[Founders] will delight readers and no doubt add to their knowledge through a tale rarely told so well." –Publishers Weekly
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“Entertaining yet informative . . . a highly readable work of popular history that is sure to be a hit.” –Library Journal
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"In Founding Myths (2004), Raphael exhorted readers to repair to original sources, and in this volume he is as good as his word. Extensively quoting seven [participants], he revives their routes to becoming revolutionaries, their often discordant aspirations for the revolution, and their personal contributions to its outcome. … Raphael's robust storytelling makes for almost an evangelizing introduction to the American Revolution." –Booklist
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Founders: The People Who Brought You a Nation is Raphael’s largest and most ambitious book, a daring attempt to recreate an “honest history” of our nation’s founding by skipping over nineteenth century distortions and returning to primary sources from Revolutionary times. It’s a sweeping narrative, starting with the beginnings of unrest in 1761 and ending with the ratification of the Bill of Rights thirty years later. To keep his rendition intimate, Raphael focuses of seven lead characters — not the usual cast, but a far more diverse lot. For the first time, Raphael interweaves the new bottom-up approach, the favorite of social historians in recent years, with traditional top-down history, moving back and forth between leading figures inside chambers and the people “out-of-doors.” George Washington is one of his leading characters, but so too is Joseph Plumb Martin, a private in Washington’s army. The pragmatic Robert Morris, the Founding Era’s richest merchant who rescued the young nation from bankruptcy, goes head to head with Thomas Young, a peripatetic revolutionary who fomented rebellion in seven states. Rounding out the leading cast are Timothy Bigelow, a common blacksmith from the heartland of Massachusetts who helped topple British rule the year before Lexington and Concord; Henry Laurens, a conservative slave owner from South Carolina, along with his son John, who devised a scheme to free slaves; and the idealistic Mercy Otis Warren, the most politically engaged American woman of her time. These proactive historical agents represent contrasting yet complementary outlooks and ideologies, classes and occupations, and regional interests. Taken together, they form the basis for a more complete and compelling rendition of our nation’s founding than could ever be achieved by focusing on a more cohesive coterie. In the words of noted historian Gary B. Nash, Director of the National Center for History in the Schools, Raphael “teaches us more about the multiple dimensions of the American Revolution than one could ever have imagined.” (Read the Introduction.)

Previous Books on the American Revolution

True history and good stories work at cross purposes. History in fact is a rambling mess, which stories tidy up. Successful narratives feature heroes and heroines, clear plotlines, and neat beginnings and endings, but in real life, things don’t usually happen that way. Clumsy Goliath generally overwhelms clever David, but you’d never guess it from the tales we hear or read.

Traditional stories of our nation’s birth are driven not only by these narrative demands, but also by political concerns. Invented in the nineteenth century to serve the interests of an expansive nationalism, we cling to them today because they give us an honored and exclusively American tradition.

In his recent books on the American Revolution, award-winning author and historian Ray Raphael explores this intriguing intersection between history-making and story-making. Our best-loved tales sell America short, he says. This nation was founded not just by the handful of “Founding Fathers” we have come to revere, but also by the revolutionary activities of hundreds of thousands of patriots dedicated to the notion that all government must be firmly rooted in “the body of the people,” as they said at the time.

Raphael’s critically acclaimed People’s History of the American Revolution, the first volume of Howard Zinn’s People’s History Series, highlights the experiences of common people of the Revolutionary Era — farmers and farmwives, artisans and laborers, African Americans and Native Americans. “Ray Raphael has probably altered the way in which future historians will see events,” wrote the London Sunday Times. “His narrative is a tour de force.”

The First American Revolution presents a close-up of one dramatic episode that has been hidden from history: the forcible overthrow of British authority in 1774, staged by tens of thousands of common farmers throughout Massachusetts the year before Lexington and Concord. His in-depth research has caused scholars to re-evaluate their notions of how the Revolution began, and texts are now being revised to include his findings.

Founding Myths: Stories that Hide our Patriotic Past details how and why our most cherished tales were invented in the nineteenth century, and why we continue to tell them now. By deconstructing thirteen stories such as Paul Revere’s Ride, the “Shot Heard Round the World,” the winter at Valley Forge, and “Give me liberty or give me death,” Raphael shows that any honest history of our nation’s founding must come to grips with the many distortions that still anchor our core narrative.

©2004 Neil Raphael