Sociologist Charles Tilly has been influential in explaining politics, history, and how societies change. This work tackles fundamental questions about the nature of personal, political and national identities and their linkage to big events - revolutions, social movements, democratization and other processes of political and social change. Tilly focuses on the role of stories, both as a means of creating personal identity and as explanations, true or false, of political tensions and realities. He uses well-known examples from around the world - the Zapatista rebellion, Hindu-Muslim conflicts, and other examples in which nationalism and other forms of group identity are politically pivotal. Tilly writes with the immediacy of a journalist but with the insight of a theorist.