Great Non-Fiction: 1776

And look! Tall ships on the cover!

As a history teacher, I’d rank 1776 as one of the top ten dates everybody should know. Americans, of course, associate loads of mental images with this year. It is marked both by the Declaration of Independence and the beginning of the Revolutionary War and is truly one of the big turning-points in history.

Why, you ask, should you read an account of a long-ago war in a far-away country? Won’t it be just another boring story of tactics and crusty old generals? Reading David McCullough’s 1776, however, is anything but boring. Instead of crusty old generals, there’s a handful of completely inexperienced, yet highly enthusiastic young (and older) men who make the cause their own and act with dashing courage and astonishing perseverance – from the famous George Washington to lesser-known figures like Nathanael Greene and Henry Knox*. McCullough makes them come alive so much that even though the outcome of the war is a given to the modern reader, you are made to live through all the hopeful episodes and valleys of despair as though you were right there, in bad old boots and without anything to eat.

Talking of the outcome – before I’d read the book, I hadn’t been aware of how slight the chance to succeed was for the Americans  in 1776:

Especially for those who had been with Washington and who knew what a close call it was at the beginning–how often circumstance, storms, contrary winds, the oddities or strengths of individual character had made the difference–the outcome seemed little short of a miracle.

Subjunctive history thoughts are never far from the reader’s mind in this rip-roaring adventure tale. McCullough writes very accessibly, and the subject matter is so exciting that I was very disappointed to find out, when I was two-thirds through the book, that one third of the pages (which I was hoping would contain more adventures) was devoted to an extensive bibliography. It’s a work of history, after all – but Sir Walter Scott himself could not have cooked up a more thrilling and chivalrous tale.

A subjunctive history map

What if the Nazis had conquered New York in Word War 2? Melissa Gould does a mental/geographical experiment in which everything is renamed to resemble Berlin.

In this ironic linking of the two cities I know most intimately I am proposing a city in which I would not, in fact, be allowed to exist. Yet NEU-YORK is paradoxically an homage to the German language — my father’s mother tongue which I also speak fluently — and the poetic aspects of the German culture, the very same culture that German and Austrian Jews rightfully identified as their own, and which might have been mine to embrace had the historical continuum not been broken.

It is rather brilliantly done, with all the ancient fonts and washed-out colours, but personally, I am really and truly creeped out by this sinister vision (it’s even got a “Hohenschönhausen” subway station! Creepissimo!) It’s probably the same gut reaction that has kept be from reading Robert Harris’ Fatherland.

Found (of course) at Strange Maps.