It’s hard, this year, to think of the Glorious Fourth as anything other than the start of a three-day weekend, with a parade and fireworks (weather permitting, of course!) thrown in for good measure. If the weather does force you inside for a couple of hours, I would recommend watching 1776, the musical based on the events leading up to the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Every American should see it at least once because a) it’s way more interesting than the history you remember from grade school, and b) it’s such fun to watch William Daniels (as John Adams) in full rant: “I have come to the conclusion that one useless man is called a disgrace, that two are called a law firm, and that three or more become a congress.”

However, underneath all the humor and music, you get the very real sense of how, well, revolutionary, that time was. Now, of course, we think of it as inevitable—we studied it in school!—but, really, we shouldn’t have won that war; it’s some kind of miracle that we did.

We have several books telling the history of our Revolution from the point of view of the losing side, i.e. the British. The Long Fuse: How England Lost the American Colonies, 1760-1785, by Don Cook, describes how Britain, at the height of her power but suffering from internal political strife, made one mistake after another, culminating in the loss of her prized American colonies.

Christopher Hibbert’s Redcoats and Rebels: the American Revolution Through British Eyes portrays a frequently savage guerilla war which raged the length of the continent. It was a war in which the British had, in some areas, the support of the majority of the colonists, rarely lost a battle on land or sea, more well-trained, well-supplied soldiers—and still lost the war.

Those Damned Rebels: the American Revolution As Seen Through British Eyes, by Michael Pearson, uses contemporary letters, journals, and official British government correspondence to present a “realistic picture of a major power attempting to put down a revolt for the very understandable reason that its leaders believed that if they failed, the whole Empire would collapse.”

Stanley Weintraub’s thesis in Iron Tears: America’s Battle For Freedom, Britain’s Quagmire: 1775-1783 is that our War of Independence was Britain’s Vietnam.

“A Few Bloody Noses:” the Realities and Mythologies Of the American Revolution, by Robert Harvey, (a descendant both of George Grenville, whose Stamp Act is credited with starting the Revolution, and the Marquess of Rockingham, who ended it), was “always fascinated by how the war divided British opinion, for and against: as with the Vietnam War, it was lost as much in the mother country and globally as in the actual theatre of hostilities.”

Reading one of these books reminds us that America almost didn’t survive her birth, and that we shouldn’t take her continued health, on this, her 132^nd birthday, for granted.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 1st, 2008 at 8:59 am and is filed under Fairborn. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response.