AUTHOR’S NOTE
I was in primary school when I first visited the Liberty Bell and pressed my hand upon it in wonder, feeling its cool bronze power. Through that touch, which would probably get me arrested today, I felt a link to the extraordinary years of the mid-eighteenth century, which pushed me toward more artifacts and venues of the American Revolution. It was only after many years of such visits and studying the chronicles of the era that I began to grasp that the Revolution is best understood not as a military event, but as a deeply complex social process. Battles didn’t revolutionize America, it was scores of thousands of personal revolutions that transformed the colonists, who then transformed their colonies. Conventions and congresses amplified those transformed voices and focused
