THE FATE OF THE DAY: The Struggle for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780, by Rick Atkinson
Does anybody doubt that the upcoming 250th anniversary of the American Revolution will produce a substantial amount of jingoistic nonsense parading as historical past? The bicentennial of our nation’s start befell throughout a singularly self-reflective historic second, only a yr after the entire withdrawal of the USA from Vietnam and two years after Richard Nixon’s post-Watergate resignation.
However that didn’t cease the Ford administration from feting George Washington as a saint, militiamen as disciplined sharpshooters who mowed down faceless redcoats, and the 13 colonies as having defeated probably the most highly effective empire on Earth within the identify of all males being created equal. These myths, acquainted to anybody who has heard the “Hamilton” solid album, have been intentionally cultivated within the a long time after the Revolution to foster American nationalism in a fractured physique politic. Their promoters in 1976 hoped they’d have the identical impact.
There’s cause to assume that subsequent yr’s celebration will up the ante. Days earlier than the Division of Authorities Effectivity started dismantling the National Endowment for the Humanities, officers on the company canceled the summer season stipend program for researchers as a part of “programming changes” made “in preparation for the celebration of the nation’s semi-quincentennial.” But readers who imagine not solely that historic accuracy and patriotism are appropriate but additionally that acknowledging the complexity of the Revolution will increase fairly than diminishes the American victory needn’t dismay. For we’ve got Rick Atkinson.
Informal browsers of the neighborhood bookstore might be forgiven for mistaking the primary quantity of Atkinson’s Revolution Trilogy as effluvia of the “America First” nostalgia machine. The blazing weapons and vaguely antiquated font on the quilt of quantity one, “The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777” (2019), present little trace of the huge, brilliantly illuminated world contained inside its almost 800 pages.
There isn’t a higher author of narrative historical past than the Pulitzer Prize-winning Atkinson, who is ready to transport readers to a special time and place with out minimizing the variations of the previous from the current. Deeply researched and meticulously structured, “The British Are Coming” is a sweeping account of the primary 21 months of the conflict as seen from a exceptional variety of views: British and American, patriot and loyalist, Hessian and French. Atkinson considers the that means of the battle to the enslaved in addition to the free — to officers, diplomats, troopers, sailors, farmers and tradeswomen. Dozens of vibrant character sketches reveal the poverty of our clichéd understandings of the conflict’s heroes and villains.
