"Alf Evers, who completed this work months shy of his 100th birthday, is perhaps the foremost chronicler of the history and color of the Hudson Valley region. He has delved deeply through the historical record, as well as innumerable first-hand accounts and anecdotes, to provide readers with the full story of the city that played a vital part in the founding of the United States. Inhabited by Indians since pre-history, colonized by Dutch traders in the seventeenth century, oppressed by British Colonial rule, and an important locus of action during the American Revolution, Kingston was also the home of progressive thinkers in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries"--from front jacket flap.