Using more than a thousand eyewitness records, prizewinning historian Woody Holton describes the origins and crucial battles of the Revolution focusing on marginalized Americans—enslaved Africans and African Americans, Native Americans, women and dissenters—and on overlooked factors such as weather, geography and (most of all) disease. Offering surprises at every turn—for example, Holton makes a convincing case that Britain never had a chance of winning the war—this majestic history revivifies a story we thought we already knew.