I picked up a copy of this 1960s Pulitzer prize winner when I was last over in Watertown, NY and I am glad I did. It is a history of the pamphleteering that preceeded or rather framed the American Revolution. It makes one very interesting point - that the American Revolution was concluded by the War of Independence, they are not quite synonymous.

Visceral stuff and full of footnotes it's taught me a few things and sometimes turned on light bulbs. I knew that Ben Franklin's son was the Governor of New Jersey but had not twigged that Ben Franklin's son was the Governor of New Jersey and a major force in Loyalist leadership. They didn't get along much after a certain point though Ben left him land in Nova Scotia in his will. Where did Benjamin Franklin own land in Nova Scotia? Another idea that is set out neatly is that the Revolution was a continuation of sorts of the Glorious Revolution, that America made itself independent to protect and continue an essential idea of Britishness - liberty. Poor old Denmark gets a lot of mileage from the pamphleteers as the bad example of a democracy that reverted to tyranny. Liberty exists through the harmonious balance of the royal, the noble and the common which, if unbalanced becomes tyranny, oligarchy or the mob. Nearing the beginning of the fighting, a fourth class becomes described - the ministry. Otherwise known as the bureaucracy, it seems to be the source of the idea of the badness of big government as Ben himself wrote in 1775: "numberless and needless places, enormous salaries, pensions, perquisites, bribes, groundless quarrels, foolish expeditions, false accounts or not accounts, contracts and jobs, devour all revenue and produce continual necessity in the midst of plenty." Not actually ideological opposition so much as opposition to the parasite. I'll think on that as I head to work today.

Anyway, worth reading as part of a well rounded amateur understanding of why the people down they stopped being us as well as a good source for Tea Party folk needing new catch phrases.