Sometimes the title makes explaining a book's ambition superfluous. This is one of those times. Patrick Spero and Michael Zuckerman have assembled a focussed and coherent group of essays that do, in large measure, fulfill the title's promise. And it is an ambitious promise, of which the editors make no secret: “to reinvigorate a field,” as Spero succinctly puts it in his introduction (3). Zuckerman's conclusion declares this to be “a subversive book,” daring to undermine “American testament” and “holy writ” (300–1). It is a surprisingly apocalyptic understanding of what it means to intervene in historiographical debates that, according to this book, are pretty musty. This liveliness and sense of importance are owed, in large part, to the book's ambition to also participate in “a civic conversation that began with the birth of the new republic and has never abated” (301).

In pursuit of that lofty goal the editors have brought together a collection of essays that, within the more mundane parameters of revolutionary historiography, seek to transcend a well-known (and much-lamented) scholarly stalemate between the familiar “schools” of interpretation – neo-Whig, neo-Progressive, and neo-imperial. Instead, the contributors set out to challenge patriotic pieties in favor of an acknowledgment of the complexity, the ambiguity, and the sheer brutality of revolution. This is the American Revolution as civil war, in which the strongest motivating ideal is not liberty but the wrenching struggle to keep body and soul, kith and kin, together in a world of bewildering complexity.

The essays of Part 1, “Civil Wars: Challenging the Patriotic Narrative,” take up this task most directly. Michael McDonnell takes aim at the patriotic stories crafted by the “winners,” instead recovering the lives of individuals who complicate this narrative. Travis Glasson points up the side-switching and compromise that defined life in Newport during the Revolution. Aaron Sullivan's study of Revolutionary Pennsylvania puts the patriots in the role of coercive despots, enacting harsh measures against those who tried to stay out of the conflict. Kimberly Nath tells a similar story, following the fortunes of the Shoemaker family as their loyalism separated the members of the family for long periods of the war. Finally, Denver Brunsman examines impressment to show that the loyalty of sailors was often up for grabs.

Part II seeks to broaden horizons. Ned Landsman draws parallels between debates about Union in Scotland and in the colonies, while Katherine Carté Engel dusts off the Bishop controversy, revealing how it split transatlantic networks of Protestant dissent. Bryan Rosenblithe ranges even farther afield, connecting imperial policy in America to similar shifts in Africa. Finally, Mark Boonshoft examines the role of the Great Awakening and the educational institutions it spawned in equipping leading colonists to become “essential power actors” during the Revolution.

Part III, “New Directions,” has less unity but offers fine essays. Zara Anishanslin brings the methods of material-culture scholarship to bear on a gruesome target – a scalp – to explain the forging of racial boundaries between white and Indian during the Revolution. Matthew Spooner turns to the other racial divide, revealing how the Revolution intensified competition for slave property in ways that turned the South into a brutally violent place even as it facilitated the rise of a new slaveholding elite. David Hsiung rounds out the section with an essay on the production of saltpeter and what it reveals about the inability of the Continental Congress to secure fervent support.

The final section deals with legacies. Aaron Fogleman sums up the Revolution's effects on migration (minimal) while Edward Gray contributes an insightful essay on the origins of the Mason–Dixon line. David Shields addresses the volume's title directly, noting Revolutionary resonances in nineteenth-century America and positing that the true power of the Revolution lies precisely in its ability to be reborn.

In places the originality of the book's contribution is overstated. Recent surveys of the Revolution by Patrick Griffin and Alan Taylor both, in their own way, present a complex, violent, and ambiguous revolution. Readers of those books, and scholars of the Revolution generally, will not be shaken to the core by the revelations here. But they will find important contributions to an ongoing process of reinterpretation – rebirth – underway in Revolutionary historiography. Simplistic patriot narratives, not current among scholars, likewise occasionally appear here as straw men, as if this book were the first to discover that the patriots’ conceptions of themselves are not to be taken at face value. This, of course, relates to the book's admirable civic ambitions; the idea that they are is still plenty current among Americans at large. Still, one wonders if a pricey hardback collection of essays, that most scholarly of book types, is likely to reshape popular understanding. One hopes. But this is, in any event, a fine collection of essays.