The Minutemen and Their World

by Robert A. Gross, Alan M. Taylor (Foreword)

Winner of the Bancroft Prize

The Minutemen and Their World, first published in 1976, is reissued now in a twenty-fifth anniversary edition with a new Foreword by Alan Taylor and a new Afterword by the author.

On April 19, 1775, the American Revolution began at the Old North Bridge in Concord, Massachusetts. The "shot heard round the world" catapulted this sleepy New England town into the midst of revolutionary fervor, and Concord went on to become the intellectual capital of the new republic. The town--future home to Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne--soon came to symbolize devotion to liberty, intellectual freedom, and the stubborn integrity of rural life. In The Minutemen and Their World, Robert Gross has written a remarkably subtle and detailed reconstruction of the lives and community of this special place, and a compelling interpretation of the American Revolution as a social movement.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, American Revolution, American History, American Revolutionary War, War, Military History

242 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1976

About the author

A specialist in the social and cultural history of the United States, from the colonial era through the nineteenth century, Robert Alan Gross is an emeritus faculty member at the University of Connecticut.

Reviews

[alex angelosanto · Rating 5 out of 5]

Last week I was on a walk with my wife and father-in-law while visiting her family in Massachusetts. It was in that no man land in the calendar between Christmas and New Year's. Maybe it was the rush between Thanksgiving and Christmas, or Christmas Day landing in the middle of the week this year, but that in-between time felt more luxurious. Like time’s coil, tightening all year unspooled itself in these final days. So with no plans, shopping, wrapping, or even any meals planned, we went for a walk. First, on a loop around Lake Quannapowitt. It had frozen over the previous night and a light sheet of snow covered our path. My father-in-law told us stories of him and his comrades coming to the frozen lake to play hockey. He had a Byzantine route that was almost entirely behind people’s houses. His North Star was a string of bonfires kids had set burning so they could skate by night.

After a few more miles I wasn’t sure what town we were in. The road was long gone and we were submerged in a series of rolling hills on a small dirt path through ancient farmland. It was only mid-afternoon but the sky was nearing total dark. A bend in a river appeared and as we followed its path we saw a long narrow bridge striding across it. It is strange to be walking and talking about the past and realize you are in the backyard of The Old Manse, home of Emerson’s grandfather and the opening battle of the American Revolution. Before long we were at the foot of a bronze statue of the archetypical minuteman. Near him there was a robust grave for the British dead, with lines from james russell lowell that amounted to “rest in piss”. Walking in this untethered time thinking about the end of 2024, the 1950s of my father in law’s childhood, and April 1775, it was like we had hammered time into a series of sliding doors, and could walk in and out of them with ease.

In some ways reading "The Minutemen and Their World" was me correcting a previous mistake I made. About three years ago, I tried to read his lengthy “The Transcendentalists and Their World” but after 100 pages, I was adrift. I had assumed, having read a good chunk of literature from and about the Concord Set, I could jump into Gross’s book with ease. But the lengths he went on about Ezra Ripley and the endless controversies at Concord’s First Parish Church, I was like Mulhouse crying at the Premiere of The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show. Walden Pond was my Fireworks Factory.

What I had missed the first time I read him was that Robert Gross was a Social Historian. A type of history I had probably brushed past a few times but not something I actively sought out. This was not a book about the hero’s of Transcendentalism and what makes them so neat. It was a study of a town, and how the soil of that town, the everyday people, made something like Transcendentalism possible.

Not unlike “The Transcendentalists and Their World” “The Minutemen and Their World” spends precious little time on the Minutemen and more on the latter. In both cases, it's The World Gross is after. This book, just under 200 pages covers the society of Concord roughly two generations before the Transcendentalist. It is a riveting, lush work of history that pulls down the mythic and lays it right at your feet. It was like the literary equivalent of accidentally stumbling into William Emerson’s backyard.

Concord before the revolution was a successful but downwardly mobile town. It was far enough away from Boston to not get sucked into its orbit but not so far away as to be considered the frontier (which was about 25-30 miles west of Concord to give you an idea of how close yonder territories were). It was like a real-life Pastoral scene, away but near, ideal but tactile. The descriptions of the civic life were fascinating. The town leaders occupied this nebulous democrat-republican zone that deferred to authority but expected autonomy. They respected and defended the monarchy but in an abstract, almost religious sense. In the 140 years since its founding, the people of Concord had gotten used to the long leash from the mother country and the self-reliance it took to live in the wilderness. As the forest had finally been cleared and they could begin to rest easy, the empire decided now was the time to tug on the leash. For the people of Concord, it was a shock. A Shock that moved slowly, then all at once towards total self-rule.

Gross goes to great lengths to point out two novel points. The first is that the revolutionary Spirit was rhetorical and rhetorical only in Concord. In some towns that burned a little brighter with rebellion, the American Revolution was seen as a chance to truly wipe the slate clean. The slate being all of human history. For Concord, it was paradoxically about preserving what they saw as ancient rights. Concord had become a sustainable project through the ancient rights and customs of the yeoman workers. Now the crown was breaking those customs and it was their honor-bound duty to reject the crown's demands. Other writers have also brought up this irony of history, that the American Revolution was business as usual draped in the language of social revolution. And to complicate things further for the poor American mind, The Civil War ended up being its fun house figura- A true social revolution draped the language of business as usual.

The second point was even more interesting- that Concord on the eve of the revolution was in serious social and economic decline. Never, in all my reading has Fredrick Jackson Tuner’s thesis of the Frontier been so vindicated as Concord at the turn of the 18th century. (Worth considering that FJT wrote the lion’s share while living in Cambridge, just a short ride from Concord). The map of Concord by 1760 was set. There were no more dark woods or unknown lands. The farmland was claimed and borders between them were painstakingly made with stones pulled from the soil. Now with Farmers having 7-10 children, the oldest inheriting the farm, there was a vast majority of children with no future in Concord. More often than not they went west to territories in New Hampshire or North to Maine. But the process was alienating as it broke down families, scattering them across unknown forests in New England and beyond. This led to further societal breakdown and arguments about town leadership and church leadership that seemingly broke the first law of thermodynamics. Progress was at a standstill, which is fitting because their treasured rights of personal property and inheritance had taken them to a place with no future.

It was only by luck that the revolution melted all the old resentment and through the draft and literal disease, was able to stave off the problems of overcrowding. Robert Gross revels in this irony and leaves us to meditate on just who are the authors in our great human drama. Are we fitted to the times, or do we do the fitting? Gross complicates the just-so stories that take up so much space in our thinking about the American Revolution. Rather, he unspools the grand narratives and lets us walk through history like pilgrims without a destination. It may not leave you with many clean and clear adages, but at least you can say you were there.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ever since it was originally published nearly a half-century ago, Robert Gross’s microhistory of Concord during the Revolutionary War era has been a staple of college history courses and reading lists. A model of the “new social history” that had emerged a decade before, it delves into the lives of the members of its community and recounts the momentous developments of the period from their perspective. In the process, it humanizes the men and women of that generation in a very necessary way, showing that they were not enlightened revolutionaries, but ordinary people who were responding to events into which their lives were thrust.

While all of this made it an important work when it was first released in 1976, it does not explain its endurance as a study of its subject. Much of the credit for that goes to Gross’s fluent writing style. Avoiding the twin perils of academic jargon and excessive detail, he recounts Concord’s long-past disputes in a way that makes them accessible and even relatable to his readers. While this has contributed to his book’s status as a classic, he has also ensured its continuing relevance to readers more recently with a complete updating of his work. Unlike other authors who are too often content simply to add a new forward or afterword to justify a new edition of their books, Gross put the time and effort into a fuller revision that incorporates into his analysis the decades of subsequent research that have built upon his work. Such patient effort not only maintains the book’s relevance as a study of its subject, but guarantees that future generations of readers will rely upon it for decades to come.

[Olde American Spirit · Rating 3 out of 5]

review to come

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent little book -- though its argument is shaky. Gross describes life in the town of Concord, Massachusetts in the years before, during, and after the American Revolution. He argues that the Revolution marked a significant change in Concordians' consciousness; they became more individualistic, egalitarian, resistant to authority. What Gross actually shows, however, is that the key changes in Concord community life began decades before the Revolution and continued to gather force for decades after.

It was not the American Revolution that produced Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, but a long process of geographic, economic, and spiritual fragmentation in New England. This evolution probably contributed to the Revolution, but the Revolution hardly seems to have accelerated it at all.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book. He gives a detailed account of Concord, Massachusetts, in the period before, during, and after the Revolutionary War. It highlights the details of daily life in the late colonial and early republic eras for real people (average Americans), and it shows how the movement for independence was something that many colonists were reluctant to pursue even in that hotbed of aggitation Massachusetts (almost right up to the breakout of hostilities). It's also one of the best accounts of the Battles of Lexington and Concord out there.

[Louis W · Rating 4 out of 5]

A surprisingly intimate and well-written history of the personal stresses that put the average minuteman's finger on the trigger just before the shot heard 'round the world. One kernel that's kind of (maybe scarily) relevant for today: By the time you start fighting to protect the world you know, the world you know is already mostly gone and you're 3/4 of the way to a totally different world you wouldn't recognized.

[Destiney Linker · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book really captured me. I expected to read the introduction, the topic sentences, and the conclusion, as us grad students are wont to do when we have stacks upon stacks of books to read. But, despite my need to sleep, I ended up reading almost every word of this one. The subject matter is engrossing, although I do feel that Gross doesn't have much of a thesis. But, still, it stands as a classic and as a great example of new social history.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an old classic, that somehow I got through grad school without reading. I think it was because the field has generally moved past these old social history "town studies," and so I had to be generally aware of them, but nobody made me actually read them. But then this was advertised to me as this new, revised, reissued edition (foreword by Alan Taylor! oooh, fancy) so I figured...maybe I should read it?
I have to say, it is pretty good. It is definitely old fashioned, and I probably wouldn't assign the whole book. But maybe I would! In a class devoted to just the Revolution, this could work really well. I don't know if this was the case with the 70s edition, but Gross spends some time on female Concordians, and Black Concordians...it's nice to get this broad picture of all sorts of people, combined with a deep dive into small town politics. There are all sorts of little details that help the reader understand the time better. Like, for instance, Gross points out that on the roster of Concord Minutemen were ten sets of brothers, ten sets of first cousins, ten sets of uncles and nephews, and at least four brothers-in-law. These were tight knit groups. I guess I sort of assumed this was true, but it was really interesting to see it spelled out like this in detail. Gross also illuminates this dynamic in the town where lots of couples were kind of forcing the issue of marriage by getting pregnant before they were married. Parents had a lot of power over when young people got married and moved out, but couples could speed up that process by...fooling around a bit. Hard to deny them once the baby's on the way. Lots of stuff like this really helps the colonial town come to life.

[Jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

At times fascinating and at other times a slog, this book was meticulously researched and full of details about the people living in and around Concord, MA in colonial and Revolutionary War times. Some of the stories were a lot of fun, other times it felt like a dry list of facts. I'm glad I had it on audio, I don't think I would have made it through the printed version! If you are ultra-interested in that particular area of the country during that specific time period, this is definitely the book for you. If you're looking for a broad overview, this is not the book for you.

[Nicky · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting social history of Concord, MA during the Revolution. I was surprised it was not a military history (almost at all)--there were only a handful of pages that looked at 'the shot heard 'round the world.' The overall synthesis, however, of different materials was very interesting. I especially loved learning of the roles that women and slaves had in the minutemen work (which of course was limited, but there was some more wiggle room than people usually assume?).

[Michelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had to read “The Minutemen and their World” for my history class. This book was honestly really boring to read. Reading about the town of Concord during the American Revolution was interesting, and I like the story of different townspeople Gross weaves into it. However, the author uses way too many numbers, dates and figures, and that made it hard for the book to keep my interest unfortunately.

[Jeff Raymond · Rating 5 out of 5]

I haven't loved a history book as much as I loved this one in a long time. Great storytelling of the Revolutionary Era, at the hyper-local level. Just brilliantly done.

[Alexandra · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the afterword he says that people will care less about the argument than about the characters and I've never seen a historian understand the audience better

[Josh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Robert Gross' The Minutemen and Their World offers an excellent social history of Concord, Massachusetts before, during, and after the American Revolution. Gross combed through the archives and used demographic records and written correspondence to reconstruct the daily lives of Concordians. He advances a tenuous argument that the American Revolution precipitated a social, intellectual, and economic revolution in Concord.

Gross argues that the American Revolution transformed Concord by making its people more resistant to authority, rank and privilege, economically progressive, and less insular in its politics and social worldview. His evidence undermines the revolutionary character of the war, because what Gross actually demonstrates is that longterm patterns (dating back as far as the early 1760s) set these changes in motion. In fact, the various "revolutions" that visited Concord culminated during the early 1800s.

For example, one component of Gross's argument is that the American Revolution either accelerated or transformed Concord's economic outlook, agricultural methods, and outbound trade. His evidence rather suggests that unchecked demographic growth (i.e. too many sons) made land scarce and taxed the town's already limited food and energy. Concordians were searching for economic alternatives before the first shots were fired.

Did the American Revolution suddenly make Concord more cosmopolitan in its outlook? Gross may have some valid points here. For example, the faculty and students at Harvard relocated to Concord for its 1775-1776 academic year, exposing many of Concord's social elites to new ideas and social relations. Certainly, Concord's sons who volunteered or were conscripted into the militias and Continental Army traveled to new places and discovered new ideas. Nevertheless, Gross also demonstrates that the economic problems (land scarcity) had already accelerated emigration from Concord—the younger generations were rejecting their patrimony and staking a claim westward or in other, less settled New England communities. Many of these wayward and prodigal sons returned to Concord and subsequently became successful businessmen.Thus, emigration and immigration in Concord was well-established before the American Revolution.

Reading this book in 2015, Gross' narrative of the Battles of Lexington and Concord seem well-trod ground now. Perhaps it seemed more novel in 1976. Nevertheless, Gross gestures toward race, gender, and topics in military history that later became important and fruitful subfields. He spends some time assessing soldiers' motivations, as he writes: "Men go to war for many reasons. Some they proudly announce to the world, some they conceal, and some they scarcely imagine" (105). Although he only explicitly discusses motivations in a few pages, his background to the American Revolution—economic decline, generational tension, lack of opportunity for young men, religious acrimony, intense localism—provide some of the context needed to understand why men took up arms against the British regulars on April 19, 1775.

Overall, this is a great book that still has value today, although historians have revised many of its significant claims.

[Charles Wynn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I would consider myself quite well versed in American History. I quite enjoyed this book, and found it very interesting to dive into the history of a Specific town. That being said, I thought it could've had a little more history about the minutemen themselves.

Plus, I am a sucker for any book that mentions Natick, even if only briefly.

[Chris Gager · Rating 4 out of 5]

Will begin soon and perhaps read concurrently with "Mockingjay" since they share a common theme - rebellion. My paperback copy, which I got from the break room at work, has a different cover.

It's a struggle to find time right NOW to get into this but I'm trying. Pretty interesting so far.

Interesting to read that all was not so harmonious in Concord leading up to the revolution. A major ongoing(for years) political/religious soap opera divided the town.

I read quote a bit last night, including a description of the "Fight". It really didn't amount to much. The earlier dust-up in Lexington was bloodier for the Colonials. Things became much more dire for the Redcoats when they delayed their retreat to Boston. One might even question the moral rectitude of the guerrilla tactics of the un-led Minutemen. They were out for British blood. Oh well, war IS nasty, nasty, nasty...

- misprint on page 132 - last line of chapter 5...

I had to finish my last week's New Yorker before the new one comes today so I didn't finish this. Tonight... One interesting thing to observe is the connection between the American Colonials and today's Tea Party. As with both there's there near paranoia of oppression by a remote, powerful governmental authority. A lot of the fear and resentment focuses around taxation. Is this reasonable? It was a legitimate issue then but if resistance to taxation had prevailed the USA would never have been more than a confederation of states and regions. This is something that threatens us today - the corrosive pull of disunity. Who knows how it will all turn out.

And now done after last night with this excellent, interesting book. It's kind of scholarly(50 pages of notes and index at the end!) but very readable for all the info provided. Not great literature though so only a 4*...

[Quinn Wright · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting book that leads the reader to enjoy the eb and flow of the common people as they go from deference to activist and back over and over throughout the development of the Revolution. Gross does well to make his scope broad enough to show the changes that occur in Concord, while maintaining his focus on the Minutemen and the development of the American Character through the American Revolution. Perfect for someone with a basic understanding of the revolution to make a more personal, empirical connection to what actually happened to lead to the Revolution. Slow at some points and contradictory within the same pages at points, but serves to make his point that the development of a Concordian identity was a turbulent process of various power struggles.

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Forty five years is a long time in history! And let’s be real, a somewhat less long time in the rather slow-moving world of academic history. Robert Gross started “The Minutemen and Their World” near the high water mark of social history in the American academy. Minute studies of New England towns were in! It helped that we Yankees are meticulous record keepers. There’s a cruel parody of every historiographical school implicit in its work, no matter how generative. The American social historians never had that Hobsbawm-Thompson of their British counterparts/inspirations. You kind of got the idea they thought they were getting away with something. “We can… we can parse old tax records and not make a point about them but consider it ‘history from below’ because it’s not about famous people?!”

Anyhoo, Gross saw where the wind was blowing and he was writing just before the bicentennial, so he got to have his cake and eat it too. He could comb the finely-kept records of the Concord burghers, and tie it in to a larger political point, i.e., how did these people convince themselves to take on an Empire they were just recently pretty proud to be in on?

Truth be told there’s more burgherdom than revolution — more “world” than “Minutemen” — but honestly, that’s ok. Concord was a world on the move! You might just assume it would be anyway because it was a colony, all rough and new. But it was a hundred fifty years old by 1775! It was the first Puritan settlement away from the sight of the ocean in Massachusetts. Moreover, the Puritan fathers weren’t… well, it’s complicated, and Gross doesn’t analyze it closely. The Puritans were capitalists, some of the most important proto-capitalists. But they really didn’t seem to think a lot about the potentially socially corrosive effects of capitalism, or if they did, they thought that, I don’t know, prayer and surveillance could fix it?

I was going to say the Puritans weren’t big “opportunity people,” and maybe that is right- their capitalism was the frowny Weberian kind, where you thank your stern god for his sufficiency. They were “harmony people.” They wanted everyone on the same page. They wanted to do a Heaven LARP until god pulled the plug on this whole “material reality” farce. What did that mean a century and a half on? It meant Concord didn’t know how they were going to keep sons on the farm. Land was expensive and not super great to begin with. Open lands in places we don’t think of now as “open land” — Worcester County! Vermont! — beckoned. Social control was strict in Concord and people got in big theological pissing contests. They were definitely better off than they’d likely be in Britain. But they weren’t as well off as they’d like.

A general rise of individualism connects “The Minutemen and Their World” and the book released forty five years later, “The Transcendentalists and Their World.” The Minutemen beat the British! That was unexpected! It helps that the British used relative kid gloves on them, as fellow white English-speaking Protestants. About fifty years later, Concord is going pretty well after recovering from the time of troubles around 1812, but still needs to figure out what exactly it’s for, other than a springboard to places west. Industrialization is creeping in, and going past the traditional mechanic-operator-owned shops to big mills worked by a proletariat. Lowell is in full swing and often wants to steal the courthouse — it was a good thing to have the county courthouse in your town back then — from Concord, which the townsfolk fend off with their establishment political muscle. Even as Puritanism receded, the established political powers of New England sought harmony and order over most other social considerations.

How you gonna keep ‘em down on the farm once they’ve seen Andy? Andy Jackson, that is. Jackson never won Massachusetts, or came close (New Hampshire, on the other hand…). But Jacksonian politics shattered New England’s elite-run politics. In some places, including Concord, it took the form of Anti-Masonic politics. A lot of big shots in Concord (and elsewhere, including a certain Tennessean President) were Freemasons, so inchoate populism streamed that way (a similar dynamic prevailed with the Know-Nothings a generation later). Even where Jackson’s enemies prevailed, they had to learn to play the game on something like his terms, appealing to the populace, modifying old laws, and in general learning to act in a master-race-democracy polity rather than an (also racist) aristocratic-republican one. Say what you will, but he put himself at the head of a political shift that knew what time it was.

What did all that mean for Concord and the Transcendentalists? Well… vibes, I guess? A general effort to figure out a society where there was — along with everything else — a pretty unprecedented degree of individual opportunity? I can hear people flinching away from that. I know! Most people didn’t have a lot of opportunity. I know that “opportunity” is one of those sacred words like “courage” (we don’t want to say Andrew Jackson had that, because it’s sacred and he was bad, but…). But… maybe it shouldn’t be? Maybe it’s purely fucking circumstantial? Maybe people shouldn’t need a fairy godmother of opportunity to bless them to have a decent life? And every other empire on earth had similar structures keeping out-groups from accessing the fairy godmother, and a smaller in-group. That’s all I’m saying about America. It figured out how to do a big in-group. Slavery and the destruction and dispossession of indigenous people was a prerequisite for it. I’m not saying it was great.

And, in many respects, the Transcendentalists became the poets and philosophers of that society and its opportunities. There were others, and vast portions of that society — anyone south of New York, basically — had nothing good to say about Emerson, Thoreau, or their milieu. But, like Yankees playing the Jacksonian politics game, eventually, Southrons learned to play the Emersonian personhood game. Emerson, for his part, learned it by navigating between various factions in and around Concord. There’s the elitism of the high toned Whigs, but spiritualized- anyone could be a great soul, just like Jacksonian Democracy promised (to whites). Emerson’s Concord was only a few years out from the Unitarians basically hijacking the Massachusetts religious establishment, and a lot of Emerson’s idea of man’s relationship to the spiritual world came from them… but the Trinitarians (which eventually became Congregationalists), who held to something like the orthodox New England faith, showed how emotional appeals could actually touch people, in the way that chilly Unitarian reasonability couldn’t, so Emerson learned to take from that, too. He talked reform and was at least somewhat anti-slavery… but the real reform, as far as he was concerned, was realizing you are, in fact, fantastic, if only you realize it, the original notionally-progressive self-help hack.

Honestly, I see more of this in Emerson than European romanticism, but what do I know? It surprises me that a curmudgeon like Carlyle would hang with this dude, but Emerson could be a mean prick too, and you gotta figure Carlyle wouldn’t look the gift horse of an American publicist in the mouth… people in the expanding south and west might have seen Emerson’s irreligion and light-abolitionism as a threat (you have to figure they just thought Thoreau was a piker and fake), but they embraced something of his anything goes — except politics! which are stupid — ethos, the idea that the individual is the basis of all good, not necessarily because said individual is the ol’ image-and-likeness, but not not because of that, either! Because Emerson copped more attitudes than he actually staked claims, it’s possible to integrate him into all kinds of projects of personal fulfillment. The South would soon be so thoroughly dominated by slaver politics that you couldn’t afford to praise Emerson for generations hence, but again- Jackson never got close to winning Massachusetts, either.

Like the Minutemen book, the Transcendentalists book is more “world” than the subjects, and honestly, that’s a good thing. As you can probably tell I am not a fan of the Transcendentalists. It’s hard out there, for an appreciator of New England’s intellectual heritage who doesn’t actually like a lot of New England thinkers! Gross, forty-five years into a tenured career, sees it all for the good. It probably was, for him. Anyway! This was respectable social history with a good intellectual soupçon. ****/****’

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though generally interested in the topic, I approached this book primarily as a trial run with Gross's methods as a granular social historian in deciding whether to get his recent and massive The Transcendentalists and Their World. It proved beneficial on both counts. Gross resuscitated and enlivened a period in American history that had become rote in its embossed romanticism and mythologizing. It wasn't as pretty as we like to think, or were taught to think when I was a lad in short pants. And I found his methodology so fascinating that I opted to buy the new book even before finishing this one. Mind you, the granular can get a bit grainy at times, especially for listening to in car, unable to stop and reread passages on evolution of representative gov't or market economics in Colonial times, but never at expense of the big picture, or in this case, the l0cal picture of life in Concord, as microcosm of big picture. Whether yeoman, slave, merchant, wealthy landowner, pastor, Tory or Whig, Gross really brings these folks to life, following several of them for many years. They form a fascinating story, not just a compilation of statistics in social analysis. The biggest thing that sticks with me is how thorny family relations could be when it came to fathers distributing increasingly small and worn out plots of land to sons, and the precarious odds of children striking out on their own with no inheritance, migrating "West," which often meant "just" a few miles distance but back then might as well have been another country (female children, with no such rights at all, had it even worse). And the practice of "warning out," whereby local sheriff could force undesirables -- vagrants, the poor, ex-debtor's prison inmates, often former successful farmers or merchants fallen on hard times , anyone not able to pull their weight and contribute to financial welfare of town coffers -- to move on. Some of these folks got caught in a loop. moving from one town or village to another until they ended up back home, humiliated and not welcomed by community they'd been forced to leave in the first place.. All of this background provides a much richer and more nuanced portrait of the famous "Minutemen" than what I learned in grade school.

Despite the drawback of difficulty following some thick details, the audio provides two major benefits: excellent narration and new Afterword by Gross, in which he describes his own evolution as a historian in taking up methods of social history.

4 1/2 starts.

[Roger · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is written from the perspective of the everyday citizens of Concord, MA - rather than from the perspective of Revolutionary firebrands like Sam Adams / John Adams / John Hancock / Paul Revere and others; and it makes little mention of Boston and the revolutionary fervor happening there. It focuses on just what was happening in this one community both before /during / and after the 4/19/1775 (the Lexington / Concord outbreak of fighting with the British).

Concord actually stayed out the fray almost entirely until the fall of 1774 when the Coercive Acts finally interfered with their ability to hold Town Meetings whenever they wanted. They paid little attention to the Boston Tea Party; and maintained strong (if tenuous) connections to the Crown through 1774 - even providing food and forage for the King's troops occupying Boston.

Concord had all the usual problems of the age - not enough land to subdivide for the next generation, premarital conception forcing early marriages, and financial and religious struggles within their own populations. Once engaged, Concord got fully involved by supplying troops, hiding military stores, and ultimately demanding that Massachusetts hold a Constitutional Convention to create a new state constitution, instead of just continuing with a federation approach to government.

[Neil Lynch · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is actually a pair of books, Gross's book teamed with TRACES OF THE PAST: A GUIDE TO MINUTE MAN NATIONAL HISTORICAL PARK. "Traces" tells the story of this national historical park in Massachusetts through its archeological story; "Minutemen" focus on the people and events that thrust the town of Concord, Massachusetts into the forefront of the American Revolution. If you're a Revolutionary War fan - or even a national parks buff - these combines are a powerful read. We get a glimpse of Concord as a rural Bay Road backwater/crossroads, along with the petty squabbles of its inhabitants over affairs of Faith, of State, and of Commerce. We see how three minutes at Concord's North Bridge is enough to change the order of the universe; then, it's over, events move on and the townsfolk are left to dal with the aftermath, some better than others. "Traces" looks closely at the remains of structures that witnessed history and the stories they tell. We learn that there are interesting archeological sites throughout Minute Man National Historical Park and how they are being preserved, protected, and interpreted for park visitors. Read together, the books offer a wealth of information and an up-close look at a significant moment in history.

[Zachary Bennett · Rating 4 out of 5]

An enjoyable book, but more significantly an important book--read Alan Taylor's forward if you have a later edition (also available for free on google books).

Minutemen and Their World in many ways popularized new social history in the 1970s. Gross employs the statistical methods from earlier (and more dull) New England town studies to cast light on the daily lives of colonists during the Revolution. As a consequence, if you are more familiar with the "big events" and "big men" of the Revolution this will give you a great picture of how ordinary people experienced and understood that event. Gross does a great job weaving together an array of sources to tell this story. I suggest going under the hood and peeking at the footnotes to appreciate the amount of research Gross put into this work. The book also does a solid job of summarizing the findings of gender and cultural historians (at least up to 1976) in this story. My only critique is that some chapters, especially toward the second half of the book, go into an amount of detail antiquarians would find interesting, but not ordinary readers. An essential read for anyone interested in the American Revolution.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been on a three-month drought as far as reading goes. I just haven't been able to motivate myself lately. I started this one in mid-December and finally got around to finishing it. That said, I didn't feel like I was missing anything after the delay; I was able to pick it up and recall the work's major themes and some the biographical details of Concord's noteworthy residents.

To me, a good non-fiction work makes the reader more curious about the topic that is discussed. It introduces new questions and encourages new pursuits of related subject matter. I've been curious about how PA Germans interpreted events surrounding the Revolution, how they reacted to their changing world, etc., so I'll probably search out books that address these questions.

[Richp · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is primarily about their world, and the Minutemen featured were prominent among the small fraction of Minutemen who were Concord residents. (Prominent is used here to mean documented and notable in retrospect, and not in the sense of leading citizen, although most of the ones profiled were leading citizens.) The author correctly describes this as a social history, which includes economics and politics. For those primarily interested in the military aspects, there is not much here. For those interested in all the Minutemen and their towns that were not Concord or part of it, there is also not much.

Within its limited scope, I thought this was pretty good.

[Donna · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read for a Gold Leaf Senior College class on the American Revolution. Very detailed description of the life of the citizens of Concord Mass where the Revolution "started" on the north bridge. This book names names of the townspeople, marriages, economic booms and busts of individual families, and those who gathered to fire the first shots. Concord was really fighting to preserve their way of life, something that changed dramatically in the years during and following the war. Certain similarities exist in our own times with the economic vagaries, political play, and homage to a few wealthy men who tended to run things before and after the war.

[Stephen Morrissey · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The Minutemen and Their World" transports readers back to the Revolutionary days of Concord, Massachusetts, not into a hotbed of pre-revolutionary fervor as some may expect, but rather into a complicated community battling religious conflict and diminishing economic prospects for younger generations. Gross superbly teases out the ways that Concord held off on revolutionary passion until very close to the fateful day in April when British Redcoats stomped through Lexington and Concord in 1775. For synthesizing local history with macro-history, there is likely no better book on Revolutionary America.

[Gregory Knapp · Rating 1 out of 5]

I think Gross' use of "Minutemen" in the title is a gross mischaracterization of this book. The minutemen and the events surrounding them and the revolutionary war are purely placeholders for Gross to pick apart the lives of the people of Concord in the late 1700's. Written from the far-left perspective that America and Americans aren't that great, this book is a plod with the author going on tangents to point out more negatives. I have no clue why this book was highly rate. As a fan of revolutionary era history, this was a bore that put me to sleep too many nights.

[Stephen Dutton · Rating 2 out of 5]

Nothing wrong with this book in particular. History of Concord Massachusetts before during and after the revolution. The two stars for me was only because it did not keep my interest all the way through the book. I found that in large sections I was reading the first and last sentences of paragraphs to skip through. But otherwise, though written in about 1975, it's still a very good book to read worth the time. my copy was from 1980.

[Debbie Jacob · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alan M. Taylor's The Minutemen and Their World is an interesting and unexpected look at the rural farmers of Concord and their participation in the Revolutionary War. Taylor broadens the perspective of the Revolutionary War and extinguishes the notion that only upper-class Americans organized and spearheaded the war. In this book, readers get an important look at westward expansion and the everyday lives of ordinary people.

[Adam Neuman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Still a must read for those interested in this time period!

While originally published in the 1970's this piece is just as timely today. Whether a reader is new to studying this time period or an avid consumer of all things revolutionary, this book provides insight and facts that will benefit all.