The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America
"Horne returns with insights about the American Revolution that fracture even more some comforting myths about the Founding Fathers. The author does not tiptoe through history’s grassy fields; he swings a scythe...Clear and sometimes-passionate prose shows us the persistent nastiness underlying our founding narrative."-Kirkus,"Horne, Moores Professor of history and African-American studies at the University of Houston, confidently and convincingly reconstructs the origin myth of the United States grounded in the context of slavery...Horne’s study is rich, not dry; his research is meticulous, thorough, fascinating, and thought-provoking. Horne emphasizes the importance of considering this alternate telling of our American origin myth and how such a founding still affects our nation today."-Publishers Weekly,"This utterly original book argues that story of the American Revolution has been told without a major piece of the puzzle in place. The rise of slavery and the British empire created a pattern of imperial war, slave resistance, and arming of slaves that led to instability and, ultimately, an embrace of independence. Horne integrates the British West Indies, Florida, and the entire colonial period with recent work on the Carolinas and Virginia; the result is a larger synthesis that puts slave-based profits and slave restiveness front and center. The Americans re-emerge not just as anti-colonial free traders but as particularly devoted to an emerging color line and to their control over the future of a slavery based economy. A remarkable and important contribution to our understanding of the creation of the United States."-David Waldstreicher,Temple University"The Counter-Revolution of 1776shows the centrality of slavery in colonial American life, north as well as south. It demonstrates how enslaved people’s  struggles merged with international and imperial politics as the British empire frayed. Gerald Horne finds among white American revolutionaries people who wanted to defend slavery against real threats. He addresses how in the United States, alone among the new western hemisphere republics, slavery thrived rather than waned, until its cataclysmic destruction during the Civil War."-Edward Countryman,Southern Methodist University"Nearly everything about Gerald Home’s livelyThe Counter-Revolution of 1776—from the questions asked to the comparisons drawn—is provocative. And if Professor Home is right, nearly everything American historians thought we knew about the birth of the nation is wrong."-Woody Holton,author ofForced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in