HOMEPAGE FOR RAY RAPHAEL

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.

Ray Raphael is currently working on an inclusive, popular narrative of our nation’s birth, casting people from diverse levels of the social hierarchy as “founders.” Seven lead characters drive the story forward, interacting with one another and evolving over the entirety of the Revolutionary Era. If other popular histories position known celebrities at center stage, this book spotlights life-sized people from all walks of life and lets the reality of what they did stand, without distortion or mythology. The Constitution’s framers and ordinary farmers, bankers and blacksmiths, slave masters and slaves help shape the story, as they once shaped the course of a newly emerging nation. (Read Introduction.)

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