Frontier Rebels: The Fight for Independence in the American West, 1765-1776 [Hardcover]

Spero presents convincing support for his thesis that hatred of Indians and desire for their lands played a pivotal role in fomenting the revolution&[Spero delves] deeply into previously underutilized sources&Speros thoughtful work is an important contribution to ongoing reassessments of the nature and meaning of the American founding.Using lively and persuasive prose, [Spero] resets the common account of the American Revolution, moving it from New England to the perilous Western frontier and reveals that the West played a crucial role in the fight for American independence.Patrick Spero uses a little-known rebellion that erupted in western Pennsylvania a decade before Lexington and Concord to expose prerevolutionary America in all its ambiguity. The result is history in a grain of sand.Patrick Spero broadens the horizons on the meaning of American independence, expanding the map from the Sons of Liberty in Boston to the Black Boys on the western frontier. Both groups chose to defy British authority for Jeffersonian reasons, but harbored quite different definitions of pursuit of happiness. Thus a long lost story that Spero tells with understated elegance.Patrick Spero shines a bright light on a forgotten stream of the American Revolution, one that flowed from the Indian-hating frontiers of the west rather than from the liberty-loving cities of the east. That stream has been forgotten not just because elite easterners have written so many of our histories but because it reveals so many unsettling truths about the origins of cherished democratic values. This book is must-reading.In lively and compelling prose, Patrick Spero tells the little-known story of a group of vigilantes who helped to change the course of American history.Shifting his vision away from eastern ports like Boston and Philadelphia to the dark and bloody ground of the Pennsylvania frontier, Patrick Spero offers a compelling and important new interpretation of the roots of the Americl#"