Posted on 09/01/2013 6:16:15 PM PDT by rlmorel
I have begun reading a book recommended to me by a friend, "Bunker Hill: a City, a Siege, a Revolution", by Nathaniel Philbrick.
I am about a quarter of the way into it, and I find myself wondering why this conservative friend of mine would recommend this book to me.
I have always placed the Founders of this country on a high pedestal, and that pedestal has became more solid and pronounced the more I have learned about those men, with a few exceptions. I have always tried to view those men realistically, knowing they weren't deities, but men, and often flawed men at that. Furthermore, I have tried not to view them solely through a prism of the values some of us hold today, but have tried to view their actions in the context of the world they lived in at that time, from what I know of it.
But I do know that they placed all they had on the line, including their necks, and shepherded this country through rocky shoals that are nearly unimaginable today, and for that, I hold them in very high regard.
This book relates the time leading up to the Battle of Bunker Hill in what I see as a completely one-sided view of the founders involved in Boston to that time, as grasping, ungrateful, Machiavellian brutes. It accepts the views of the Crown and the loyalists in their totality, and impugns the men in New England including John Hancock, John Adams, Samuel Adams and Joseph Warren (amongst others) as being so deeply unhinged by their flaws as to invalidate any claims they might have legitimately had against the crown.
John Hancock was a back-stabbing double-dealer. The author went out of the way to stress that Joseph Warren's young wife had their first child less than nine months after they were married. John Adams was psychologically unstable and unreliable. Rank and file patriots of the day made their trade completely on the assault and mistreatment of loyalists. And so on.
The view presented by this author is so completely one sided that I found myself questioning whether I understood and correctly comprehended what I was reading.
I am interesting in knowing if any other Freepers have read this book, and if so, what were their impressions of it?
Washington may have been “The Indispensable Man”, but so was Adams.
We could have made it though the revolution without Jefferson. We might have made it without Franklin.
But in my opinion, we wouldn’t have made it without Adams. There was a lot of scut work he handled. And they needed someone for that scut work who simply would not shut up and make it easy for people to ignore him.
I suspect Adams would have been impossible to ignore...
The Founders are deserving of our respect. We owe it to them today to fix and maintain what they wrought, but we also owe it to them to be grateful and respectful for their tenaciousness, persistence, and skill.
Thanks for your perspective; now I can avoid reading the slanderous screed which was recommended to you.
Furthermore the Colonists contributed buckets of blood fighting the French and Indians. For the most part the French and Indians whipped the British Regulars butts, and it was those lowly Colonist who did most of the winning.
This sounds like another revisionist pile of poodoo.
Humanity almost entirely consists of crooked timbers, but, like journalists, historians sometimes have too great a fondness for telling of the flaws and errors of historical figures without placing them in proper context. The larger point is to recognize that the many weaknesses that we see on our own side today will not necessarily be fatal to our cause.
I also found Mayflower a great read and Philbrick introduced me to Benjamin Church. A real American hero.
Zinn can be washed out by reading FReeper LS’s Patroit’s History of the United States. Check out his profile page.
I was reading some of the reviews on Amazon re: Bunker Hill. The “most helpful” 3-star review, with all of its replies reminds me how ignorant of American history I am.
But I’ve decided to buy Bunker Hill, because I was reminded on Amazon that Philbrick also wrote a great book about Custer.
I flat out love a good story, and Philbrick tells one. So what if I contribute to his Nantucket lifestyle? Bill Belichick lives on Nantucket also!
It is indeed a paradox.
And I don’t mind a bit contributing to Bill Belichick’s opulent lifestyle.
Oh, I am well acquainted with the good work of our fellow Freeper LS...;)
And to reiterate, I did enjoy his writing style in his other work I read, but that work did not seem to have a hard left bent to it.
And I am not advocating people NOT read it, quite the contrary.
I was just trying to get some feedback on whether I am correctly interpreting the book I am reading...because I did not expect this at all.
And I would be willing to admit if I am, and I keep that judgment open. I really am puzzled by the tone of the book.
We are all fallible. All of us. We are human, and we have to be.
And I agree with you, the context is not just important, it is critical.
Have you read the book? There is certainly some colonial church bashing by the author due to the colonial Christian anti-Papist animus.
He goes out of his way to stress this point, I believe in the fraction of the book I have read, I have heard the author make reference to it at least three, possibly four separate times.
Thank your for pinging LS for his opinion.
I recognize LS is part of the same community as the author, and may be obliged to exercise a degree of diplomacy, though I suspect that diplomacy and truth will not be mutually exclusive...:)
I loved this book. I am a tea party conservative and a Sarah Palin follower. I read this book twice over a couple years. Likewise, I read his other book, “Mayflower,” which was awesome. I never thought he was a bleeding heart at all. I thought it was kind of a warts and all type of story. I honestly love this author and I loved these 2 books. I read nothing but history.
I read the book . I didn’t see it as an apology for the crown. The author actually uses a lot of the principal players actual correspondence and shows them warts and all.
From the rioting resulting from the British seizure of Hancock’s ship Liberty leading to the occupation of Boston in 1768, through the bravery of America’s first black war hero at Bunker Hill, Salem Poor, to the entry of George Washington on the world stage, the author does a nice job of bringing together events that are usually addressed separately in history classes and make no sense out of context.
It’s also an excellent summary of the events leading up to the revolution. I didn’t see that the author was taking the King’s side at all. It’s just a fact that the British wanted us to pay some of the debt they incurred for defending us in the French and Indian War.
It’s also a fact that the provincials preferred to govern themselves and resisted attempts by Parliament to exercise their authority.
I enjoyed the book quite a bit.
Haven’t read the book, but it is just a fact that the history of our Revolution is a great deal more complicated and less justified than has traditionally been taught in America.
The single most obvious issue is the Patriot assumption that the British government intended to progressively destroy their freedoms, that there was a conscious conspiracy to do so.
We have the records of Cabinet meetings and other government documents, and there just was no such conspiracy. The British stumbled into war due much more to incompetence and inattention than malevolence.
You will find it difficult to locate a greater fan of the Declaration of Independence than I, but the greater part of it, the list of grievances against the King, is at best one-sided spin and at worst largely lies. If you go through the list one at a time and examine the truthfulness of the claim this is easy to see.
You will note that later British colonization of the American type, overseas settlement of British and other whites, is mostly absent tyrannical oppression of the type Americans claimed was the British intent. After all, there are certainly much worse national fates than becoming Canada or Australia. To be fair, the Brits didn’t get into another American type of colonial war possibly because they were taught a very sharp lesson by us.
The Loyalists were also appallingly mistreated. MUCH worse than Confederates were. It is actually kind of funny to read Confederate apologists complaining about how constitutional rights were violated by Lincoln, when in a somewhat similar civil war the Founders themselves violated the rights of Loyalists much more severely.
Bash Israel... as in Israel Putnam :)
I personally like the guy ;)
Just kidding. I haven’t read anything by him. I did like Tom Wolfe’s new novel, “Back to Blood”.
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