![]() ![]() ![]() Ferling stresses this, and it makes this weighty, deeply-researched tome surprisingly thrilling reading. ![]() Throughout Winning Independence, there flickers an alternate American Revolution that went a very different way, with Saratoga and even Yorktown itself looking more like temporary setbacks than event-shaping debacles. Ferling points out that colonial military leaders who’d been overjoyed at the entrance of France into the war in the wake of scrappy military victories like the one at Saratoga in 1777 were singing a very different tune by 1781, when the promise of France’s continued help seemed to be flickering, and when the British under Sir Henry Clinton seemed intent on separating the South from the rest of the rebellion and keeping the fighting going until the north was crushed. ![]() So says the living dean of American historians of the period, John Ferling, in his big and immensely satisfying new book Winning Independence. The way the American Revolution is typically taught in schools - as a rag-tag rebellion on the edge of annihilation until the fateful year 1778 brought the French into the war on the side of the rebels, after which the defeat of General Cornwallis at Yorktown and the winning of independence was all but a foregone conclusion - does pitiful justice to the actual nature of the on-the-ground realities of the time. Winning Independence: The Decisive Years of the Revolutionary War, 1778-1781 ![]()
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