I was interested in the Ken Burns’ series about the American Revolution, but I have a hard time making myself watching things on television, so I was pleased when I saw the companion volume in the library. As with The Raider, it reminded me of familiar events, but provided a lot of additional perspectives which give me a more nuanced understanding of the events. And, once again, I’m baring my soul a bit here to describe my own naivete because my education in history was so meagre.

I first learned about the American Revolution when I was in public school in southwest Michigan. None of the locations were places I had ever visited or known about, which made them hard to picture or bring into any kind of alignment with each other. But subsequently I moved to Massachusetts and visited many of the other locations — even if only driving through on the highway — which now gives me a lot more insight into their relative location and geography. Of course, I’ve also spent many months on a Caribbean island which — though not a direct player in the American Revolution, was fundamental to the forces that were driving the dynamic of the revolution.

The book has chapters to the major episodes of the American Revolution. The stage is set and then the familiar events are described, often by using short vignettes that highlight particular people — all kinds of people — so you see the war not from some top-down perspective, but through the eyes of individuals: Soldiers, to be sure, but also women, enslaved people, indigenous people, and immigrants. Certainly there is a bias toward the wealthy, as they were the most likely to have left behind a journal or record of their experiences. But there is a clear striving for diverse viewpoints that enriches the storytelling.

In between the chapters are a series of essays that offer supplementary analysis that provides different ways for thinking about the events. One by Stephen Conway, argues that Americans tend to think of the American Revolution as fundamentally about America, whereas to the British, it was but one element out of a complex set of imperial events — and was driven less by events in America itself than changes that Britain was making to integrate their colonial empire around the world.

One thing I had never really understood about slavery was the extent to which it was the foundation upon which almost all of the really large fortunes were made in that time. The super wealthy people that everyone talked about when I was young were the robber barons (e.g. Carnegie, Rockefeller, etc.) who had made their fortunes after slavery. But in the time of the American Revolution, the Caribbean islands produced the truly outsized fortunes for the nations that colonized them. The entire war involved people trying to thread the needle between pursuing “freedom” while keeping people enslaved. The book does a good job of telling that story from multiple perspectives.

The Revolutionary War was also a civil war that divided families and neighbors. This was an aspect of the war that was largely glossed over in my previous education.There were a lot of loyalists who aligned with the British forces and fought against independency. The book has an essay and follows the story of several people who tell the loyalist side of the story. In the long run, things did not turn out well for most of them.

Unlike his series about the Civil War, there were no photographs to draw from to help visualize the scenes. The book uses historical paintings, though most of them were made long after the war and were designed to represent a particular points of view rather than reflect any historical accuracy. Of course, as Werner Herzog has described about the Crimean War, even documentary photographs were often staged for effect.

The book also has historical maps showing the disposition of forces in the various battles. These I found to be more of a curiosity, rather than anything useful as a visual guide. They were often not in English or had the directions reversed, and there was no consistency to how the units were represented. I would have appreciated having interpretive maps of the battles drawn using a consistent style to show how the battles occurred. But maybe I’m just a weirdo.

Reading a heavy coffee-table book was inconvenient. But still recommended. A good read.