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.
Simon & Schuster
October 2007
On Sale: October 2, 2007
Featuring: George Washington; John Adams
256 pages ISBN: 1416542108 EAN: 9781416542100 Hardcover Add to Wish List
In this stirring 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.
Based on
extensive research in both American and British archives,
1776 is a powerful drama written with extraordinary
narrative vitality. 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. 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.
Here also is the
Revolution as experienced by American Loyalists, Hessian
mercenaries, politicians, preachers, traitors, spies, men
and women of all kinds caught in the paths of war.
At
the center of the drama, with Washington, are two young
American patriots, who, at first, knew no more of war than
what they had read in books -- Nathanael Greene, a Quaker
who was made a general at thirty-three, and Henry Knox, a
twenty-five-year-old bookseller who had the preposterous
idea of hauling the guns of Fort Ticonderoga overland to
Boston in the dead of winter.
But it is the American
commander-in-chief who stands foremost -- Washington, who
had never before led an army in battle.
The book
begins in London on October 26, 1775, when His Majesty King
George III went before Parliament to declare America in
rebellion and to affirm his resolve to crush it. From there
the story moves to the Siege of Boston and its astonishing
outcome, then to New York, where British ships and British
troops appear in numbers never imagined and the newly
proclaimed Continental Army confronts the enemy for the
first time. David McCullough's vivid rendering of the Battle
of Brooklyn and the daring American escape that followed is
a part of the book few readers will ever forget.
As
the crucial weeks pass, defeat follows defeat, and in the
long retreat across New Jersey, all hope seems gone, until
Washington launches the "brilliant stroke" that will change
history.
The darkest hours of that tumultuous year
were as dark as any Americans have known. Especially in our
own tumultuous time, 1776 is powerful testimony to
how much is owed to a rare few in that brave founding epoch,
and what a miracle it was that things turned out as they did.