1776 by David Willis McCullough (2005, Hardcover)

Synopsis
David McCullough is known for his scholarly yet readable accounts of historical events and people's lives. Fans of his biography of John Adams will find the same narrative skill in 1776, his history of the first year of the America's war for independence from Britain. General Washington is at the center of this history, but important too are the citizen-soldiers of the Continental Army, who seemed at first to be at a disadvantage compared to the well-trained and equipped British led by General Howe. Luck and pluck and good old American know-how helped even the odds, but the first year was a struggle. The difficult terrain and the weather affected all the troops, and there were victories and defeats on both sides. In his compellingly fresh accounts of important battles such as the Siege of Boston and the Battle for Brooklyn, McCullough takes familiar events of classroom history and makes them new. Includes maps, drawings, letters, and portraits in black-and-white and in color. A New York Times Notable Book of the Year for 2005.

Key Details
Author:	David Willis McCullough
Language:	English
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Format:	Hardcover
ISBN-10:	0743226712
ISBN-13:	9780743226714

Size
Length:	386 pages
Thickness:	1.2 in
Weight:	28 oz

Publisher's Note
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.

Industry Reviews
"[A] lucid and lively work that will engage both Revolutionary War bores and general readers who have avoided the subject since their school days....McCullough deftly sketches characters with a few quotations and details, humanizing a cast of thousands....A stirring and timely work, reminding us its soldiers rather than 'tavern patriots and windy politicians' who have always paid the price of American idealism and determined its successes."
New York Times Book Review - Tony Horwitz (05/22/2005)

"Simply put, this is history writing at its best from one of its top practitioners."
Publishers Weekly (02/21/2005)

"David McCullough writes with confidence, panache and authority, deftly mingling high strategy and low politics, with gripes and grumbles of redcoat and rebel alike. Although written with a natural American bias, his book strives (and it usually succeeds) to be fair to both sides. I recommend it unreservedly."
Literary Review - Nigel Jones (06/01/2005)

"McCullough recounts the events of 1776 as if they had never been told before, with a freshness that brings home the drama and the sheer improbability of the events on which the U.S. is founded."
Time - Lev Grossman (12/26/2005)

"[W]hereas many academic historians find it difficult to manage the elusive transmutation of raw archival material into compelling stories peopled by vivid, realistic personalities, McCullough has the imaginative capacity to reconstitute the inner lives of the long dead."
London Review of Books - Colin Kidd (11/17/2005)

"This is history at the ground level, sometimes even a few inches below. There is squishing mud for soldiers to trudge through, letters about absent loved ones and heartbreaking deaths, driving snow, and battlefields tipped with sun-gleaming bayonets like so many teeth grasping for prey. The prose is vibrant, and there is a telling insight into each character....But the book is essentially a portrait of the Continental Army's commander."
New Yorker - Joshua Micah Marshall (05/23/2005)

"1776 is vintage McCullough; colorful, eloquent and illuminating. In reconstructing that epic year in the life of the American Revolution, he has given us a fresh portrait of Washington himself."
Newsweek - Jon Meacham (05/23/2005)