Publishers Weekly
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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.)

Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

With the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence on the horizon, Ward and Burns bring their uniquely erudite and dynamic expertise to the story of the American Revolution. As with previous illuminating companion books for their revelatory documentaries about other wars, they chronicle political and military history in startling detail through eye-witness accounts, here sharing remarkably preserved letters, journals, maps, and sketches recording the experiences and thoughts of soldiers, women, Native Americans, and African Americans on both sides of the “bloody struggle.” There’s 14-year-old white fifer John Greenwood, Virginia colonist Betsy Ambler, and James Forten, who was Black and born free, served at sea, was captured, and later made a fortune as a sailmaker. As a smallpox epidemic raged, brilliant and courageous officers rallied determined, ill-equipped, and hungry soldiers as they valiantly battled in “hundreds of places” far into Canada and the South. The complete account of “the first war ever fought proclaiming the inalienable rights of all people” is as complex as it is dramatic, given that some of the leaders calling for liberty were slaveholders, the continent was already home to a long-standing democratic confederacy of Native American nations, and one of the freedoms the rebels fought for was license to seize land beyond England's colonial border. This gripping, in-the-moment, thought-provoking, visually exciting history profoundly deepens our understanding of our nation's origins and how the past is shaping our volatile present.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: With the documentary airing on PBS in November, requests for this munificent volume will pour in.

Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Companion volume to the much-awaited Ken Burns documentary series. Longtime Burns collaborator Ward treats the American Revolution not just as a laboratory for addressing the question of how people are best governed, but also as a “savage civil war” with more than its share of atrocities. Noting that “we have mostly chosen to see the Revolution in bloodless, gallant terms,” Ward enumerates the reasons for breaking away from Britain: the failure of Parliament to include colonial representatives, providing an argument for not paying taxes to the mother country; ordinances forbidding the expansion of the colonies beyond the Appalachians; the provocation of enlisting runaway enslaved people in the British army, which “only deepened anti-British feeling among many southern colonists”; and other perceived injuries. There were wars within the Revolutionary War: Ward writes of the Continental campaign to wage war on the Cherokees and other southern Indigenous groups, with Thomas Jefferson saying, “Nothing will reduce those wretches so soon as pushing the war into the heart of their country.” Many familiar figures appear, including George Washington, whom King George III called “the greatest character of the age,” and Thomas Paine, whoseCommon Sense motivated the rebellious colonists to continue the fight with phrases such as “Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered.” But Ward is also good at turning up little-known episodes, such as Benjamin Franklin’s convincing the French crown that aiding the revolutionaries’ cause would reduce Britain’s power everywhere, adding, “Every nation in Europe wishes to see Britain humbled.” American victory at Saratoga sealed the alliance. As the author notes, the successful conclusion of the Revolutionary War did not end its strife: “The war had brought the states together, but peace threatened to tear them apart again” as they vied for position in the postwar world. A well-written and thoughtful history shrouded in myth, but even more interesting when laid bare. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.