There has never been a nation like the United States of America.

Its impact on the world is unprecedented in all of human history. After two and a half centuries of existence, it is difficult to imagine what the world would be like without it.

But how did it come into existence? Who has really done justice to this astonishing story? Innumerable books have been written about the American Revolution, but the definitive treatment of the full story simply does not exist—certainly not in our generation. And it’s a story, actually a host of stories, that every single American really must know and celebrate.

Who better to tell it than Eric Metaxas, historian and author of seven New York Times bestsellers, including the million-selling biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer? And what better time for such a book to appear than the 250th anniversary of America’s birth?

The Bicentennial in 1976 fell at a rather awkward cultural moment, following the debacles of Vietnam and Watergate and smack-dab in the middle of the especially unexciting presidency of Gerald Ford. The contrast with where America is now could hardly be greater. There is an undeniable explosion of patriotism and a concomitant hunger for the grand and sweeping epic story of our fabled founding. Millions of Americans have adopted the slogan “Make America Great Again.” But in order to do that, we must go back to the beginning and must retell the great story that made us great in the first place.

Metaxas’s The Revolution will do precisely that. At more than 500 pages—including photos, maps, and illustrations—it will be definitive and sweeping, but it will also be fabulously entertaining, containing the dazzling array of extraordinary stories every American should know, ranging from the many events that led to Lexington and Concord, all the way through the twists and turns of the war itself, until Yorktown and beyond.