The Minutemen and Their World

25th anniversary edition

By: Robert A. Gross, Alan M. Taylor - foreword

Narrated by: Tom Perkins

Winner of the Bancroft Prize

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.

©1976 Robert A. Gross; Foreword Copyright 2001 by Alan Taylor; Afterword Copyright 2001 by Robert A. Gross. (P)2019 Tantor

The details

Thorough description of the people and issues in the town of Concord, MA before and after the American Revolution

Interesting

If you want a glimpse into the times of the period this covers it. If you are looking for a detailed account of the minutemen, this probably won't satisfy.

The same conflicts persist through time

Interesting to read that life has not changed in it’s basic human conflicts: religion, people of means in power which continues through generations, the low status and opportunity for women, the poor, the blacks to control their lives, old vs young, sexual revolution of the young in the religious community- shocked that in Concord as early as 1760s that one of three pregnancies occurred out of wedlock !

A Social not Military History

If one is into American social history this book goes into minute and exacting detail. It paints a vivid picture of life during the period up to and after the Revolution providing understanding of everyday life and how the war changed everything. The book is very dry material but very well researched and presented and best of all well performed. I'd hoped the book was less social and more martial in nature but alas it was not.

great social history, but the title is misleading

As much as I like this book, I should point out that not much of it is focused on the minutemen themselves. Instead Gross tells the story of a town that has run out of room for many children of Concord. Without enough land for each child reared in town, Concord was a town that lost inhabitants, and this inability of Concord to provide land for most of a generation is one of the topics that Gross explores in his social history. Another is the Great awakening which split the church's congregation.And Concord was incorporated as a larger land entity. Residents further from town center had major problems attending church services - and town meetings. The result was that various outlying districts applied to set up its own church and/or town entity. Gross finds the concerns of Concord thus locked up in local problems, and yet Concord residents still adhered to a class system that made the richer citizens the leaders and tone setters.
Gross continues this book through the Revolution to th beginnings of a more democratic society in which the elite do not automatically control, and determine, the town's policies. Gross focuses on the changes in attitudes, less paternal for instance, over time, but the minutemen are hardly the main focus. There is a bit more focus on the militia in general, but Gross does leave himself open to criticism from readers who, reasonably, expected the main focus to be on the minutemen themselves. But it was a great read for me, and I, too, was assigned it in a college class.