Esteemed historian David McCullough covers the military side of the momentous year of 1776 with characteristic insight and a gripping narrative, adding new scholarship and a fresh perspective to the beginning of the American Revolution.
Simon and Schuster
June 2005
On Sale: May 24, 2005
Featuring: George Washington
400 pages ISBN: 0743226712 EAN: 9780743226714 Kindle: B000FCK5YE Hardcover / e-Book 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.
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.