If there’s a keystone text of the current scholarship, it’s [UVA history professor] Alan Taylor’s “American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804,” a kaleidoscopic synthesis published in 2016. Taylor, a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner, takes in actors and events far beyond the 13 colonies and the founding fathers, casting a cool, antiheroic eye on the Revolution’s costs for many.