Ammerman's book narrates how colonial Americans responded to British actions and policies in the wake of the Boston Tea Party. The volume's key theme is that Parliament's passages of the Intolerable Acts utterly failed to isolate Massachusetts. Rather than isolating the Bay colony, the statutes created both anger at the government and "remarkable unanimity" among the thirteen eastern seaboard colonies, all of which culminated with the meeting of the First Continental Congress in September 1774. The book concludes with a discussion of the debates within the "Grand Congress" that autumn which led to a call for a total trade embargo with the mother country as well as for the need to prepare for war.
