1776 by David McCullough

When I read The Midwife's Revolt last month for my book club, it got me interested in reading some more things about the Revolutionary War. I realized I really didn't know or remember that much about that time in our history, and what I did know or remember was from listening to the abridged version of David McCullough's John Adams maybe a decade ago. (So, it really wasn't that much. I basically remembered that he lived in Braintree and that he and Abigail loved each other and wrote tons of letters to each other.) I found that this book was available on audiobook from the library and I was super excited to listen to it. This book, as you might imagine, is about all of the battles and difficulties of the Continental Army in the year 1776 (and 1775 leading up to it), mostly focusing on George Washington and his decisions and movements at the time. And all in all, it was really interesting--there were a few times when it was hard to follow some of the specific details about the battles that McCullough went into (and maybe that was just because I was listening and didn't have any visuals that were probably included in the book), but generally, I was pretty impressed by how McCullough made this potentially dry history into such a smooth narrative that was easy to follow.

It was also very impressive how much research into primary sources that McCullough had to do to write this book. Almost every other sentence was a quote from a letter or a diary written by someone at the time--it is exhausting to even imagine how much work it was to track down everything written by everyone, even just random privates in the army, and work it in to the story he was trying to tell. I definitely enjoyed learning more about George Washington--I'd never really thought about what his personality was, other than noble and solemn like he's always portrayed in paintings at the time, and I liked learning more about his flaws and his positive traits. The other thing that really stood out to me was how slowly and deliberately every decision about the army had to be made, on both sides. Information moved so slowly, and people moved so slowly--any battle had to be preceded by days and days of marching, and it kept things from actually progressing very quickly. It was basically understood that people didn't fight battles in the wintertime, so the war would shut down for months at a time. And it was amazing how few people were killed in each battle! Usually, the casualties for the battles described in this book were between 20 and 200--which really is amazing since I normally think about WWII where thousands of people die in every battle. I really enjoyed this and want to revisit John Adams again too (although sadly the library doesn't have an audiobook copy so I'll have to get around to reading that one hard copy sometime).