1776

McCullough documents the great victory of the American Revolutionary War.

Somehow George Washington’s rag-tag army was able to defeat the greatest military power the world had ever seen, the British Army and Navy. It’s our great lesson for the world that coercion does not work. The tyrant King George III failed to defeat freedom in America.

My book examines how these lessons were not applied to the Vietnam War. The key takeaway from a peacebuilding stance is to use the Revolutionary War as an example of the failures of force. Had the British engaged in more effective peacebuilding techniques and… show more.

This beautiful book sets the scene for Saratoga by recounting the conflict between Britain and its American colonies. It broke out in 1775 and led to a wider war, the American Declaration of Independence, Washington’s appointment as commander-in-chief, and the birth of the Continental Army in 1776. Prior to the establishment of a regular army, the rebellion was prosecuted by ad hoc gatherings of state militia regiments. Washington recruited the most effective of these into his new standing army, and authorized the creation of several new regiments from scratch by trusted subordinate officers. The militias have persisted to the present… show more.

The perfect jumping-off point for a lifelong interest in the Revolution. If McCullough’s fluid story-telling and suspenseful account of one of the great historical dramas of world history doesn’t whet a reader’s appetite, perhaps nothing will. He turns the most important year of the war into an exciting, action-packed saga. The year 1776 marked the birth of America, but it was also a time of “cowardice, disillusionment, defeat, terrible discouragement, and fear.” That the nation survived is, as McCullough notes, “little short of a miracle.”