New Edition of The Minutemen and Their World

One of the most important books about Revolutionary New England is coming out in early November, and came out almost fifty years ago.

Robert A. Gross published The Minutemen and Their World in 1976. It won the Bancroft Prize and quickly became a fundamental book in thinking about the American Revolution in New England.

There was a 25th-anniversary reissue with a new foreword by Alan Taylor. But next month we’re getting a “Revised and Expanded” edition, which looks much the same from the outside as the previous version but offers more inside.

What does “Revised and Expanded” mean? I don’t think the publisher’s webpage lays out the details fully, perhaps because the changes outstripped the original plan. I’ll quote Bob Gross himself:

This edition has a sharper picture of Concord’s stance in pre-Revolutionary politics up through 1774, particularly in comparison to its neighboring towns (Lexington was militant from the start of protests in 1765, Concord far less so); it presents new material about the tense atmosphere on the eve of April 19, 1775 and in its aftermath; it has new material on enslaved and free people of color; and it offers a fresh picture of Concord's important role as a center for incarcerating prisoners of war.

The book also has a new afterword, in which I set Minutemen in relation to the changing historiography of the Revolution over the decades since it was first published.

For years Gross was review editor for the William & Mary Quarterly, so he got a close-up view of that historiography. Presently his title is the James L. and Shirley A. Draper Professor of Early American History Emeritus at the University of Connecticut, but everyone in the field knows him as Bob.