Politics discussion

A big point that I've pulled from the book is that, well, the colonists didn't think, "this is the American Revolution we're starting here." It's very easy to take a series of events and then affix a start and end date to them. The people who lived during those events only knew how to muddle through, though. So the common criticism of the book (from what I've seen) is that it concentrates too much on the feeling of the soldiers and citizens at the time, rather than the overarching ideas of the Revolution. On the contrary, I think that may be this book's strength. How many books, articles and summaries has an American read about the American Revolution since grade school? How many times have we been told about the ideas of democracy and all the other metaphysics that goes with it? To the leaders of the time, though, this series of skirmishes and uncertainty was about very solid and very real things.

...as solid and real as McCullough's descriptions of shiny buttons and muddy water. We have to remember that people like George Washington were real people with real problems before history deifies them and they lose the most important part of them: their humanity. I think this is one of the issues with the world coining the term "Arab Spring"; it makes it too easy to take human sacrifice as a simple necessity to bring about some end.

As the Declaration of Independence stated:

"When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation."

The necessity of dissolving the political bands began as a murmur among few and grew to a chorus which, while large, never approached unanimity. But the Declaration was a single event. Boston was a single event. Those events could not have been tied into a narrative before the story ended, when it became history. The deaths and the hardships faced were too new to be considered merely statistics. The Declaration was a list of real and fresh grievances, not a marker for metaphysical freedom. So there are two stories: 1) what happened, and 2) the narrative that history created. 1776 was mostly the first story.

Just my two cents.

Mike wrote: "A big point that I've pulled from the book is that, well, the colonists didn't think, "this is the American Revolution we're starting here." It's very easy to take a series of events and then affix..."

The author I found that most impresses me when it comes to catching the feelings of the historical figures is Jeff Shaara, he wrote The Glorious Cause based on he American revolution. I havent read it myself but have read his works on the Civil war and Korean one.