Zabin’s The Boston Massacre delivers an indelible new slant on iconic American Revolutionary history. The story of the Boston Massacre—on a late winter evening in 1770, British soldiers shot five local men to death—is familiar to generations. But from the very beginning, many accounts have obscured a fascinating truth: The Massacre arose from conflicts that were as personal as they were political.

Zabin draws on original sources to follow British troops dispatched from Ireland to Boston in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1768 to subdue the increasingly rebellious colonists. She reveals a world hidden in plain sight: Soldiers jostling with Bostonians for living space, finding common cause in the search for a lost child, trading barbs, and sharing baptisms. Becoming, in other words, neighbors. When soldiers shot unarmed citizens in the street, it was these intensely human, now broken bonds that fueled what quickly became a bitterly fought American Revolution.

Serena Zabin is a professor of history and director of the American studies program at Carleton College. Her books include Dangerous Economies: Status and Commerce in Imperial New York and she is also the codesigner of a forthcoming serious video game about the Boston Massacre, Witness to the Revolution.