The American Revolution: An Intimate History

Historian Ward (The Vietnam War) once again partners with documentarian Burns (Blood Memory) for this comprehensive history of the birth of America. As with the authors’ past collaborations, the book is a companion to Burns’s upcoming documentary of the same name. According to Burns’s preface, the revolution is “our epic song, our epic verse,” and the book honors the scope of the conflict with a lavish array of maps, paintings, and photographs of historical sites. But the bulk of the volume is comprised of Ward’s lucid prose and exquisitely rendered details. (About the Massachusetts militiamen: “They were farmers and artisans and shopkeepers, mostly, wearing... homespun clothes.... Local blacksmiths had hammered out their officers’ swords.”) Ward doesn’t shy away from the subject’s darker currents, including the great paradox at its center: How could men pursuing liberty be comfortable with slavery? “Five enslaved people captured at Yorktown were returned to Thomas Jefferson,” he writes of the end of the war. “Two more—both women—were returned to George Washington’s Mount Vernon.” In passages like this, Ward doesn’t let historical triumphs overshadow tragedies. As Burns puts it, the revolution is often seen “in gallant, bloodless terms,” whereas the achievement of this volume is to be forthright and occasionally critical, but still grand and stirring. All truths are self-evident for Burns and Ward, not just the easy ones. (Nov.)