THE FATE OF THE DAY: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780, by Rick Atkinson
Does anyone doubt that the upcoming 250th anniversary of the American Revolution will produce a great deal of jingoistic nonsense parading as history? The bicentennial of our nation’s birth took place during a singularly self-reflective historical moment, just a year after the complete withdrawal of the United States from Vietnam and two years after Richard Nixon’s post-Watergate resignation.
But that didn’t stop 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 the most powerful empire on Earth in the name of all men being created equal. These myths, familiar to anyone who has heard the “Hamilton” cast album, were deliberately cultivated in the decades after the Revolution to foster American nationalism in a fractured body politic. Their promoters in 1976 hoped they would have the same effect.
There’s reason to think that next year’s celebration will up the ante. Days before the Department of Government Efficiency began dismantling the National Endowment for the Humanities, officials at the agency canceled the summer stipend program for researchers as part of “programming adjustments” made “in preparation for the celebration of the nation’s semi-quincentennial.” Yet readers who believe not only that historical accuracy and patriotism are compatible but also that acknowledging the complexity of the Revolution increases rather than diminishes the American victory need not dismay. For we have Rick Atkinson.
Casual browsers of the neighborhood bookstore could be forgiven for mistaking the first volume of Atkinson’s Revolution Trilogy as effluvia of the “America First” nostalgia machine. The blazing guns and vaguely antiquated font on the cover of volume one, “The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777” (2019), provide little hint of the vast, brilliantly illuminated world contained within its nearly 800 pages.
There is no better writer of narrative history than the Pulitzer Prize-winning Atkinson, who is able to transport readers to a different time and place without minimizing the differences of the past from the present. Deeply researched and meticulously structured, “The British Are Coming” is a sweeping account of the first 21 months of the war as seen from a remarkable number of perspectives: British and American, patriot and loyalist, Hessian and French. Atkinson considers the meaning of the conflict to the enslaved as well as the free — to officers, diplomats, soldiers, sailors, farmers and tradeswomen. Dozens of vibrant character sketches reveal the poverty of our clichéd understandings of the war’s heroes and villains.
