Book Description
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. 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. 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. 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. |
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