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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.
David McCullough, author
of 1776, is twice winner of the National Book Award
and twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize. He has been called
a "master of the art of narrative history." His books have
been praised for their exceptional narrative sweep, their
scholarship and insight into American life, and for their
literary distinction. His John Adams, one of the
most acclaimed American biographies ever published, hit the
New York Times bestseller list at number one and
remained on the list for more than a year. To date more than
two million copies have been sold.
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