I picked up “American Insurgents, American Patriots” for two main reasons. One is that two of my direct ancestors fought in the American Revolution as citizen soldiers in the New York Militia, and I wanted to better understand their motivations and their experiences. The second reason is that I'm an Occupier, and reading about an earlier generation of American revolutionaries and patriots is inspiring to me.

A couple of things strike me about this book. One is that the ground-level radicals and patriots who made the American Revolution happen had a far more radical conception of direct action than any Occupier. In 1774, two years before the War of Independence officially began, insurgents in New England used a campaign of mob violence and intimidation to drive every official loyal to the British government out of the countryside, leaving the British and loyalists isolated in the cities where they had soldiers to protect them. If the “Sons of Liberty” of 1774 could comment on today's events, they'd be amazed at how peaceful the Occupy movement has been.

The next thing that occurs to me is that the United States government of 2012 has vastly more coercive power than the British Empire of 1774 ever had. The British Empire didn't have anything like the surveillance capability of the US government, it didn't have anything like the modern prison system, and its army had nothing like the disparity in technology that now exists between the US Army and the American public. In 1774, ordinary people could and did offer real resistance to their government in a way that would no longer be possible.

The final thing that occurs to me is that the typical American rebel of 1774 and onward was a mix of beliefs and motivations that have since become separated into distinct factions. The first American revolutionaries were motivated by fierce egalitarianism, a firm and passionate belief in individual rights and liberties, evangelical Protestantism, and a belief in the sanctity of private property. I would say that the activists of the Occupy movement represent the egalitarian and rights-based aspects, while the Tea Party represents the evangelical Protestant and private property aspects of the American tradition.