I’ve always been interested in ebook platforms, readers, and distribution models. The history and future of reading is one of my favorite topics—it combines my passion for social and intellectual history, my obsession with interaction design, and my biggest hobby. So after I wrote my senior thesis in history at Berkeley, I decided to self-publish it on the Amazon Kindle store. You can also read the whole thing online here.

It’s about the buildup to the Revolutionary War, and the role that boys and young men played in urban conflicts in Boston and New York—with some bonus material about young soldiers and news carriers. It’s my attempt to take the “people’s history” movement of the twentieth century a little further, and expand our picture of ordinary people to demonstrate that political agency and power does not begin at voting age.

I wrote it and created the Kindle version using Scrivener.