Declaring Independence

On the 250th anniversary of American independence, with the history of our founding a political battleground, this study of the ideas and battlefield sacrifices of 1776 by a Pulitzer Prizewinning scholar could not be more timely.At the beginning of 1776, virtually no one in the colonies was advocating independence: Americans based their grievances against Parliament on their rights as British subjects. By the end of 1776, independence was on every patriots lips. The many tyrannies of a king had made an independent republic necessary. In Declaring Independence, Edward J. Larson gives us a compact, insightful history of that pivotal year. He traces a narrative arc that runs from the inspiring appeals of Paines Common Sense in January; through the soaring ideals of midsummer, when the Continental Congress grounded independence in the self-evident truths of human equality and individual rights, and the states wove revolutionary principles of republican government and the rule of law into their new constitutions; to Paines urgent pleas of December, when the times that try mens souls required Americans not to shrink from the service of their country. Dramatic military clashes also punctuate the year: the British evacuation of Boston forced by the brilliant maneuvers of Washingtons Army; the Battle of Long Island, a costly defeat that opened New York to British occupation; and the desperate year-end victory of a threadbare American army at Trenton.Combined, these ideals and the sacrifices remind us why, on this anniversary and at this political moment, 1776 matters to all of us.