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bupdaddy 's review for:
Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution
by Nathaniel Philbrick
Man, who would think that a book about a single battle could be so engaging?
There's plenty of context-setting, of course - everything that led to the battle, and all the things the battle caused. Philbrick makes a great case for how important this confrontation was. It really shows well how things we learn in school like the Boston Massacre, Boston Tea Party, Lexington and Concord, Ticonderoga and Bunker Hill weren't episodic punctuation marks in the pre-Declaration history of colonial uprising, but a connected series of cause and effects.
I also learned some fun nerd stuff. Bunker Hill was the bloodiest fight in the entire war. Joseph Warren was a mythical figure who'd be remembered on the level of the most famous founding fathers had he lived (although had he survived Bunker Hill he'd have probably died at the next battle, given how much he threw himself into the fore). After Bunker Hill, when Boston was sieged, General John Burgoyne staged a play at Faneuil Hall to satirize those hayseed Americans, which was interrupted just as it began by an announcement the Yankees were attacking.* When George Washington decided the time had come to have a ceremony to symbolize that the army he took over was no longer provincial, but a continental army, the ceremony entailed lowering the red continental flag and raising the Grand Union flag over the fort on Bunker Hill. Understandably, the British in Boston took it as a sign of subordinance. Oops.
The story told herein is also a story of the gradual change in attitude of Americans from believing parliament was their enemy, while their beloved king was still on their side, to understanding that liberty could only be won as they understood liberty by separating from England entirely.
So this is a great book for understanding the thread, the underlying transformation, that was taking place, whose easy-to-identify artifacts are those episodes young Americans are taught almost as vignettes.
*It is not true, however, because I looked it up after I read the book, what the book says, that specifically a caricature of George Washington was the first character on the stage, with a hopalong gait and a rusty sword at his side, who got interrupted by someone the audience mistook as an actor telling him the Americans were attacking.
There's plenty of context-setting, of course - everything that led to the battle, and all the things the battle caused. Philbrick makes a great case for how important this confrontation was. It really shows well how things we learn in school like the Boston Massacre, Boston Tea Party, Lexington and Concord, Ticonderoga and Bunker Hill weren't episodic punctuation marks in the pre-Declaration history of colonial uprising, but a connected series of cause and effects.
I also learned some fun nerd stuff. Bunker Hill was the bloodiest fight in the entire war. Joseph Warren was a mythical figure who'd be remembered on the level of the most famous founding fathers had he lived (although had he survived Bunker Hill he'd have probably died at the next battle, given how much he threw himself into the fore). After Bunker Hill, when Boston was sieged, General John Burgoyne staged a play at Faneuil Hall to satirize those hayseed Americans, which was interrupted just as it began by an announcement the Yankees were attacking.* When George Washington decided the time had come to have a ceremony to symbolize that the army he took over was no longer provincial, but a continental army, the ceremony entailed lowering the red continental flag and raising the Grand Union flag over the fort on Bunker Hill. Understandably, the British in Boston took it as a sign of subordinance. Oops.
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The story told herein is also a story of the gradual change in attitude of Americans from believing parliament was their enemy, while their beloved king was still on their side, to understanding that liberty could only be won as they understood liberty by separating from England entirely.
So this is a great book for understanding the thread, the underlying transformation, that was taking place, whose easy-to-identify artifacts are those episodes young Americans are taught almost as vignettes.
*It is not true, however, because I looked it up after I read the book, what the book says, that specifically a caricature of George Washington was the first character on the stage, with a hopalong gait and a rusty sword at his side, who got interrupted by someone the audience mistook as an actor telling him the Americans were attacking.