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Join us for conversation with Professor Woody Holton (South Carolina) about his recent book Liberty is Sweet: The Hidden History of the American Revolution

Using more than a thousand eyewitness records, Liberty Is Sweet explores countless connections between the Patriots of 1776 and other Americans whose passion for freedom often brought them into conflict with the Founding Fathers. "It is all one story," prizewinning historian Woody Holton writes. He describes the origins and crucial battles of the Revolution from Lexington and Concord to the British surrender at Yorktown, always focusing on marginalized Americans-enslaved Africans and African Americans, Native Americans, women, and dissenters-and on overlooked factors such as weather, North America's unique geography, chance, misperception, attempts to manipulate public opinion, and (most of all) disease. Thousands of enslaved Americans exploited the chaos of war to obtain their own freedom, while others were given away as enlistment bounties to whites. Women provided material support for the troops, sewing clothes for soldiers and in some cases taking part in the fighting. Both sides courted native people and mimicked their tactics. In a majestic story Walter Isaacson called a "must-read book for understanding the founding of our nation," Holton makes a convincing case that Britain never had a chance of winning the war and revivifies a story we thought we already knew.

WOODY HOLTON is Professor of History at the University of South Carolina. His 2009 book, Abigail Adams, which he wrote on a Guggenheim Fellowship, won the Bancroft Prize. Holton is also the author of Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution (2007), which was a finalist for the National Book Award. His first book, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (1999), won the Fraunces Tavern Museum Book Award (presented by the New York Sons of the Revolution) and the Merle Curti Award (presented by the Organization of American Historians). His books are required reading on more than 200 college campuses, and his work has been widely anthologized and also translated into German and Arabic. He is currently writing a comprehensive history of the American Revolutionary era.