He then goes into a great deal of detail about the early years of the Revolution, especially about the personalities involved in the conflict. The second was “epochal and enduring: the creation of the American republic.” Unlike the creation myths about America, the war, Atkinson argues, was “both grander and more nuanced, a tale of heroes and knaves, of sacrifice and blunder, of redemption and profound suffering.” The first was the reduction of the British Empire by about one-third. The results of the 3,059 days of the American Revolution were “tectonic,” Atkinson avers. But, as Voltaire had observed, history is filled with the sound of silken slippers going downstairs and wooden shoes coming up.” “The odds were heavily stacked against the Americans: no colonial rebellion had ever succeeded in casting off imperial shackles. In his Prologue, while summarizing the events that led to the Revolution, Atkinson writes: Rick Atkinson, in The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777, his first magisterial volume of the planned “Revolution” trilogy, describes just how those tensions developed and the early years of the war. Emerson’s poem describes “the shot heard round the world” fired by Patriots at the North Bridge in what is now Charlestown, in northwestern Boston, Massachusetts. Tensions had been building for many years between residents of the thirteen American colonies and the British authorities, particularly in Massachusetts. The poem “ Concord Hymn” by Ralph Waldo Emerson paid tribute to the famous Battles of Lexington and Concord, the first official military engagements between Britain and the colonies in the American Revolutionary War (1775-83).
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