America’s fight for independence reverberated around the world in significant ways, which University of Maryland history professor Richard Bell explores in his engaging new book, The American Revolution and the Fate of the World. We talked to him about what he found.

I always thought of the Revolutionary War as kind of a landlord-tenant dispute. I never realized it had such an effect on the larger world.

There’s no more important story in American mythology than the idea that the American Revolution is rebels versus redcoats, that all Americans were united under the patriot banner, fighting off a foreign invasion force. That’s an oversimplification. Plenty of Americans were not so sure about independence. And then when we go digging, we find out that many other groups of people, even oth

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