In this groundbreaking book, noted historian Thaddeus Russell tells a new and
surprising story about the origins of American freedom. Rather than crediting
the standard textbook icons, Russell demonstrates that it was those on the
fringes of society whose subversive lifestyles helped legitimize the taboo
and made America the land of the free.

In vivid portraits of renegades and their "respectable" adversaries, Russell
shows that the nation's history has been driven by clashes between those
interested in preserving social order and those more interested in pursuing
their own desires.insiders versus outsiders, good citizens versus bad.
The more these accidental revolutionaries existed, resisted, and persevered,
the more receptive society became to change.

Russell brilliantly and vibrantly argues that it was history's iconoclasts
who established many of our most cherished liberties. Russell finds these
pioneers of personal freedom in the places that usually go unexamined.saloons
and speakeasies, brothels and gambling halls, and even behind the Iron Curtain.
He introduces a fascinating array of antiheroes: drunken workers who created
the weekend; prostitutes who set the precedent for women's liberation,
including "Diamond Jessie" Hayman, a madam who owned her own land, used her
own guns, provided her employees with clothes on the cutting-edge of fashion,
and gave food and shelter to the thousands left homeless by the 1906 San
Francisco earthquake; there are also the criminals who pioneered racial
integration, unassimilated immigrants who gave us birth control, and brazen
homosexuals who broke open America's sexual culture.

Among Russell's most controversial points is his argument that the enemies
of the renegade freedoms we now hold dear are the very heroes of our history
books. he not only takes on traditional idols like John Adams, Thomas
Jefferson, Andrew Carnegie, John Rockefeller, Thomas Edison, Franklin
Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy, but he also shows that some of the most
famous and revered abolitionists, progressive activists, and leaders of the
feminist, civil rights, and gay rights movements worked to suppress the
vibrant energies of working-class women, immigrants, African Americans, and
the drag queens who founded Gay Liberation.

This is not history that can be found in textbooks. it is a highly original
and provocative portrayal of the American past as it has never been written
before.

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