spark scholarly controversy and argument," and that they "believe that such debate can clarify the issues... and enhance the understanding of this critical decade in our history." Topics covered Resistance, Politics, and the American Struggle for Independence, 1765-1775 contains 14 chapters that are intended to "relate integrally to one another and provide a complete narrative of the period [of 1765-1775]." These chapters are listed in the table at right. After the first introductory chapter, the next 7 chapters contain the book's "narrative section," which focuses on describing the struggles from 1765 to 1775 chronologically, using the "terminology of the day," and only "rarely [making] use of the term 'nonviolent action.'" The book's final 6 chapters are analytical, offering interpretations of the decade's events. These chapters address questions raised in the narrative section, and also suggest areas for future research. Basic concepts are introduced in Chapter 1, which gives an overview of the three main resistance campaigns of 1765 to 1775 opposing the Stamp Act of 1765, the Townsend Acts of 1767, and the Coercive Acts of 1774. Nonviolent action is described as a technique that operates to bring about change through serving to "manipulate the shared social, cultural, economic and political system in which the opposing parties engage in conflict." Citing Sharp's Politics of Nonviolent Action, they divide methods of nonviolent action into the three categories of nonviolent protest and persuasion, noncooperation, and nonviolent intervention. Nonviolent action succeeds by "rendering the opponent's sources of power unusable, unworkable, and uncontrollable," through mechanisms that may include conversion, accommodation, or "nonviolent coercion [that] occurs when an opponent is forced against his or her will to grant the actionists' demands." The editors argue (Ch. 1) that previous scholarship has overlooked "the degree to which the colonists used a kind of 'weapons system' that operated without force of arms or violence in trying to compel the British government to change its policies." Viewed from this angle, commercial resistance (nonimportation) is analyzed closely (Ch. 9). It is apparent that the colonists' skill in applying the methods of nonviolent struggle "improved greatly over the decade," as did the "intellectual underpinnings" of their resistance (Chs. 10, 11). Still, at the close of the decade, the nonviolent movement was abandoned in favor of military resistance, and the editors discuss six alternative hypothetical explanations for why this shift occurred (Ch. 12; see table at right). The hypothetical explanations are not