Yet this year, being so pivotal, mirrors the course of the war, for it began with defeat and retreat, but ended with great victories. Rather, it deals with a small slice of the wider campaign.

Though it takes place during the war for independence, and though it concerns that conflict, 1776 is not a history of the war. Nathaniel Philbrick’s Mayflower reminded me of the first days of the American colonies, and I have followed that with David McCullough’s 1776 which tells the story of what is easily the most pivotal, important year in America’s long and storied history. Popular history, books written about periods of the past but written in a narrative fashion rather than as dry history, have proven useful in refreshing my memory. Still, somehow I have forgotten much that I ought to know. This is shameful, really, as in high school and university I took at least two courses on American history and did quite well in them as memory serves. Written as a companion work to his celebrated biography of John Adams, David McCullough’s 1776 is another landmark in the literature of American history.I have only elementary knowledge of American history. And it is the story of the King’s men, the British commander, William Howe, and his highly disciplined redcoats who looked on their rebel foes with contempt and fought with a valor too little known. It is the story of Americans in the ranks, men of every shape, size, and color, farmers, schoolteachers, shoemakers, no-accounts, and mere boys turned soldiers.

In this masterful book, David McCullough tells the intensely human story of those who marched with General George Washington in the year of the Declaration of Independence-when the whole American cause was riding on their success, without which all hope for independence would have been dashed and the noble ideals of the Declaration would have amounted to little more than words on paper.īased on extensive research in both American and British archives, 1776 is a powerful drama written with extraordinary narrative vitality.

America’s beloved and distinguished historian presents, in a book of breathtaking excitement, drama, and narrative force, the stirring story of the year of our nation’s birth, 1776, interweaving, on both sides of the Atlantic, the actions and decisions that led Great Britain to undertake a war against her rebellious colonial subjects and that placed America’s survival in the hands of George Washington.

1776 by David McCullough