McCullough uses his descriptive powers and tactile sense of drama to lend his story a pungent immediacy, and he does an ardent job of conveying the hardships and outright specter of devastation faced by George Washington and his troops as they took on the better trained, better equipped, better disciplined British forces. . . . So gripping that it’s easy to turn the pages as if the fates of nations were still at stake. The vastly superior Royal forces didn't appear to appreciate the significance of the stakes. I now regard that approach as painfully naïve.ġ776 chronicles more or less of the famed year in American Independence when Washington's cobbled forces stumbled about. 25 years ago at university I was an aspiring Marxist and I saw the American Revolution as between two slave owning factions of the same burning house. My days of matriculation were often obscured to such narrative histories. It is no great shame, but it was the musical Hamilton which inclined me to approach the work. One late night foray led me to finish this book hours after beginning. Read moreĪ British ship’s surgeon who used the privileges of his profession to visit some of the rebel camps, described roads crowded with carts and wagons hauling mostly provisions, but also, he noted, inordinate quantities of rum - “for without New England rum, a New England army could not be kept together.” The rebels, he calculated, were consuming a bottle a day per man. 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. 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.
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