The definitive Revolutionary War book has arrived!

Ever wonder how it is that you're not about to sit down for tea and crumpets, looking forward to your wife cooking you a dinner of stuffed cow intestines? Don't laugh. For as David Hackett Fischer's landmark book illustrates, the fledgling Continental Army (not to mention a few idiosyncratic bands of state militia) came perilously close to losing the War of Independence.

Joe Ellis, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of FOUNDING BROTHERS, heaped scores of praise on WASHINGTON'S CROSSING in the February 15, 2004 edition of the New York Times Book Review:

"For reasons beyond my comprehension, there has never been a great film about the War of Independence. The Civil War, World War I, World War II and Vietnam have all been captured memorably, but the American Revolution seems to resists cinematic treatment. More than any other book, 'Washington's Crossing' provides the opportunity to correct this strange oversight, for in a confined chronological space we have the makings of both 'Patton' and 'Saving Private Ryan,' starring none other than George Washington. Fischer has provided the script. And it's all true."

David Hackett Fischer has indeed done that, Mr. Ellis. And the canon of Revolutionary War literature has a new cornerstone

outstanding history, human & grand

This is a wonderful book of history. It is well-written, a page-turner, it is well-documented, it tells an old story in a completely new way, it draws conclusions from the history that can help us think about what is happening in the world today. The thing I liked best about the book was its focus on the human story of the soldiers & the officers, among the colonial forces, the Hessians & the British. Using their diaries, letters home, memoirs, newspaper accounts & suchlike. I felt like I knew those people in a way that I have never felt with a book about the American revolution (the closest I've gotten in the past was the series of novels about the period by Kenneth Roberts).

Highly recommended.

Compelling, perceptive history at its best

On a number of occasions I have recommended David Hackett Fischer's "Paul Revere's Ride" as one of the finest American history books I have ever read, a display of deep research, perceptive analysis, and a highly compelling prose narrative. With "Washington's Crossing" Fischer has matched his earlier book. Just as the title incident in "Paul Revere's Ride" served to signify Fischer's broader study of the earliest days of the American Revolution and the battles at Lexington and Concord, here Emmanuel Leutze's 1851 painting "Washington Crossing the Delaware" is the emblem chosen to represent the most crucial days at the end of 1776 when that Revolution seemed on the edge of collapse, but George Washington and his army in battles at Trenton and Princeton and in the little-known actions afterwards reversed the course of the war and set the British on the path to ultimate defeat.

Although most Americans probably have at least a passing familiarity with Washington's surprise victory over the Hessians at Trenton on the day after Christmas, 1776, Fischer's account highlights an equally crucial, yet barely remembered, battle at Trenton a week later when the American forces withstood a counterattack by Lord Cornwallis's forces, setting the stage for a daring overnight march by Washington around the British army to win another victory at Princeton. Over the next several weeks, the British and Hessian occupation of central New Jersey collapsed as the Americans, heartened by the events at Trenton and Princeton, struck repeatedly and successfully at detachments of foragers who discovered that the supposedly pacified countryside was suddenly hostile territory. Within a few months British generals who had believed the rebellion almost crushed found that the path to victory had vanished in the snow and mud.

Fischer presents vivid portraits of the generals and common soldiers on both sides of the conflict, while dispelling old myths. The Hessians at Trenton were not awakened from drunken sleep after Christmas carousing. The American army, although sometimes short of clothing and food, was well-armed and typically enjoyed a battlefield superiority in artillery. Washington comes across as a far more complex and flexible character than he is usually depicted (in a lengthy appended essay, Fischer surveys more than two centuries of artistic representations of Washington and the victories at Trenton and Princeton), but the real heroes of Fischer's narrative are the ordinary soldiers of the Continental Army and the local militias. He argues persuasively that these men were genuinely motivated by their ideals of liberty (although a New Englander of Glover's Marblehead Regiment might differ from a Pennsylvanian frontiersman or a Virginian planter as to exactly what constituted liberty and a proper society) and it is they, not just the generals riding boldly across painted canvases, who deserve much of the credit for maintaining the Revolution and seizing the initiative to take the war to the British and Hessian garrisons and thus reverse the course of events. And Fischer highlights a consequence of the American commitment to the ideals of liberty: while Hessians and even British troops were regularly offered to take no prisoners, the Americans in general during these campaigns treated their prisoners with compassion and even generosity because of their belief that it was the right thing to do.

In his closing, Fischer writes: "The most remarkable fact about American soldiers and civilians in the New Jersey campaign is that they ... found a way to defeat a formidable enemy, not merely once at Trenton but many times in twelve weeks of continued combat. They reversed the momentum of the war. They improvised a new way of war that grew into an American tradition. And they chose a policy of humanity that aligned the conduct of the war with the values of the Revolution. They set a high example, and we have much to learn from them. Much recent historical writing has served us ill in that respect. In the late twentieth century, too many scholars tried to make the American past into a record of crime and folly. Too many writers have told us we are captives of our darker selves and helpless victims of our history. It isn't so, and never was. The story of Washington's Crossing tells us that Americans in an earlier generation were capable of acting in a higher spirit - and so are we."