When I was in school American History classes tended to linger for indefinite periods of time on the American Revolution. Then, as the school year got closer and closer to summer, the history teachers would be beset with a kind of time-driven panic and would attempt to squeeze all information on World War II, the Korean War, Vietnam, and the Cold-War into a miniscule three weeks. It was the American Revolution where they preferred to linger and, as a result, by the time I reached High School I would have rather drowned in a Boston Harbor full of tea than take one more test on “Causes of the American Revolution”. So how on earth does an author like Marc Aronson try to get teens to willingly read up on the founding of this great nation? By toting out a little transnational history, of course. Making the strong argument that the American Revolution owed just as much to “charging war elephants attacking a crumbling for in India, and the high-stakes gambles of bankers in Scotland” as to those old chestnuts “taxation” and “representation”, Aronson pulls out all the stops to get teens interesting in this newfound way of looking at America's break with the motherland. Along the way he challenges some old beliefs, fills the reader's head with enough contradictions and hypocrisies to choke a cat, and delivers a truly interesting/maddening account of dry old facts.

We all know the basics. Colonists were taxed without representation, got mad, broke from England, threw tea, blah blah blah. So what did India have to do with any of this? Everything. Meet Clive. Robert Clive. Born in 1725 he was a belligerent bully with a father who shipped him off to make his fortune with the East India Company in Madras. While there, Clive managed to help the company slowly take over India until the corporation was basically ruling an entire country. Now let's compare Clive with another soldier. Mr. George Washington. Like Clive, Washington was a fighter. Unlike Clive, Washington tended to loose his battles. Also, the father of our nation had a moral compass. Clive didn't. Using these two men, Aronson begins to weave together the fates of two nations and the people that were of primary importance in regards to America's independence and India's failure to acquire some (until Gandhi, of course). As we watch, we see the East India Company lose its grip on its country and turn it over to England proper. To make money, England attempts to sell Indian tea to America on the cheap. The same tea that gets swiftly plunged into the drink. We see Scottish bankers lose money in the stock market on the East India Company and force Virginia landowners to pay their loans (thus creating more hatred towards England). Every cause, every reason, and every mistake that went towards America believing in its own independence is weighed and mentioned in this book until the reader comes to the startling conclusion that there is no event in this world so great that it did not begin with the tiniest of details in the farthest of countries.

Aronson is at his most interesting when he examines the contradictions inherent in America's founding principals. He notes the irony apparent when you consider that the only reason our founding fathers had the leisure to consider the idea that “all men are created equal” was because their slaves were doing enough work to allow them to do so. We see England attempt to prevent the Yankee annihilation of the Native American by setting up borders (which it could not enforce). Apparently Americans felt it was a form of rebellion against England to wipe out native populations. We also see carefully constructed but no less chilling mob violence orchestrated to send England a message. As a twenty-seven-year-old who was not exactly a history fan in high school, I found myself increasingly intrigued with Aronson's clever tie-ins. He asks obvious questions like, Why didn't England just allow America to send a representative to Parliament and avoid a costly war? I mean, it makes sense doesn't it? It's only when you learn that England had lots of newly grown districts (like Manchester) with zippo representatives and extinct communities (one was even located under the sea) with multiple representatives (who just bought their way into Parliament) that it felt that giving America a voice would upset England's corrupt but comfy ways.

As an author Aronson's not perfect, of course. He's adept at bringing his story to vibrant life, but sometimes this means comparing battles to outdated movies. At one point he describes, with a little too much excitement sea battles that, “were exactly like those filmed in 'Master and Commander'”. Hm? He also has an odd love of Daniel Boone and seems to take a sort of pleasure in the settler's keen lust for American Indian blood. To Boone, disposing of native populations was, “simultaneously an expression of regret and of historical necessity”. Aronson calls this idea, “both true and tragic”. Pardon me if I fail to wholeheartedly agree.

What I did enjoy most about this book was that there were no completely good or completely bad people. Just arrogance and self-righteousness on every side. Aronson puts this perfectly when he explains that the British weren't enemies of freedom itself. “The English did not so much have a plot to destroy their [America's] independence as they could not understand what it was…. because it did not savor independence for its own people, it could not understand what the Americans were carping about”. Such nuanced views of American v. England may appear in some schools, but I can say without a doubt that most would probably not make this fact quite so clear.

A person can learn a lot from a history book aimed at teens. "The Real Revolution"'s interesting pictures, fabulous Endnotes section (which reads like a second book in and of itself), Bibliography, Web Site section, Character List, and Timeline could've stood an Index as well. Otherwise, Aronson makes it perfectly clear who his sources are at any given time and leaves it up to the reader to determine how reliable they might be. As he says at the beginning of the book, “Even if you disagree with me, that's good, because it will mean you have a strong sense of American history. That is as it should be. While we need to be good researchers, the past we are likely to believe is the one that sounds right to us in the present”. For those up-and-coming young historians, Aronson's books offers the perfect link between fact-heavy textbooks and those heady adult books full of contradictory ideas. A readable, enjoyable dive that turns the revolution into something fresh and new.


Recommended: Yes