It is the story of Americans in the ranks, men of every shape, size, and color, farmers, schoolteachers, shoemakers, no-accounts, and mere boys turned soldiers. He got an awful lot of it very wrong.In this stirring book, David McCullough tells the intensely human story of those who marched with General George Washington in the year of the Declaration of Independence - when the whole American cause was riding on their success, without which all hope for independence would have been dashed and the noble ideals of the Declaration would have amounted to little more than words on paper.Based on extensive research in both American and British archives,1776is a powerful drama written with extraordinary narrative vitality. 'There was no formal signing where everybody was present. Trumbull's famous painting, The Declaration of Independence 4 July 1776, represents the signing of the document as 'an extremely formal scene.'īut McCullough says it never took place.

George Washington, 'considered his life's cause, his great mission, to record for subsequent generations the drama and the participants of his time,' McCullough says. The great painter John Trumbull, who served in the Revolutionary War as an aide to Gen. McCullough has also included paintings from the time that he says provide historians with as much insight as the written word. Now there's a new version of the book 1776, with some of those diary entries and letters. When the Pulitzer Prize-winning author first wrote about the Revolution, he based much of his narrative on diaries and letters.

'There was no coverage of the war by the press.' 'The illustration, the reporting on the Revolutionary War was practically nothing by our terms,' author David McCullough tells Steve Inskeep.

That was not the case during America's first war. The Iraq war is chronicled constantly in photographs, newspaper stories, first-person accounts, editorials and books.

1776 by David McCullough