Tree of governanceUnder contract for the Johns Hopkins University Press’s How Things Worked series, The World Turned Upside Down: How Governance Worked During the American Revolution explains how Americans, British, and Native Americans attempted to create order out of disorder during the nation’s founding. The machinery of fully established, peacetime governments is complicated enough. But from the mid-1770s through the late 1780s, Americans founded new governments in the midst of civil war, violence, and dislocation. In easy-to-read prose and based upon a wide swath of published primary and secondary sources, from personal accounts and administrative minutes to local and state histories and larger treatments of Revolutionary-governance, The World Turned Upside Down is the first book detailing how, at every scale, Americans, British, and Native Americans doggedly tried to manage their affairs. They struggled to preserve their household units, often including532885 family and fictive kin, slaves and servants, relatives and employees. Town, city, parish, and county officials scrambled to keep courts open, local roads passable, and the poor provided for. States mixed old colonial structures and new political innovations to raise revenue, answer petitions, provide for defense against British and loyalists, suppress slaves, and regulate commerce. Military officers strove to maintain discipline for armies that included conscripts and volunteers, professionals and militia, sutlers and camp followers, and escaped slaves; administered large military prisons, and governed entire cities for extended periods. And the Continental Congress, the British empire, and various Indians groups temporized to supply armies and navies and war parties, to foster domestic and diplomatic allegiance, to keep some semblance of fiscal discipline, and to coordinate across a continent and an ocean. By examining these levels of governance on their own, and in relation to each other, The World Turned Upside Down will offer undergraduate, lay, and scholarly readers a revealing glimpse of the American Revolution’s disorder, and an appreciation of how both Americans and British contended with each other and their conditions to endure the nation’s founding conflict.