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Russell Shorto is the author of the bestselling The Island at the Center of World, “a masterpiece of storytelling and first-rate intellectual history” (Wall Street Journal) of the forgotten and mythologized Dutch colony of Manhattan. His other books include Descartes’ Bones, Saints and Madmen, and Amsterdam, a centuries-spanning portrait of the world’s most liberal city. A contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, he is the former director of the John Adams Institute in Amsterdam and Senior Scholar at the New Netherland Research Center. In Revolution Song, Shorto follows the lives of six historical figures from a British colony on the brink of revolt as a way of defending today’s American values.