Book One of The Twenty Lives at War Series. The American Revolution: 20 Short Stories of Courage, Rebellion, and Homefront Hope brings the founding era down from marble pedestals and into muddy fields, smoky taverns, and candlelit kitchens. Each of the twenty stories follows a different person whose life is upended between 1765 and 1783: a Boston dockworker who loses his livelihood to the blockade, a farmer's wife hiding a deserter in her root cellar, a Black sailor weighing British promises of freedom, a Mohawk scout watching his people pulled between empires, a teenage drummer boy marching on blistered feet, a Loyalist printer forced to choose between truth and safety. From Lexington green to the frozen huts at Valley Forge, from Charleston's harbor to frontier cabins, these voices reveal the Revolution as a patchwork of fear, faith, hunger, pride, and quiet acts of defiance. Read singly or as a whole, these stories show that independence was not just declared-it was earned, one fragile, determined life at a time.