Two views of the Fourth of July

As we celebrate the 249th Fourth of July and ponder the Semiquincentennial next year, more commentators are looking back to the origins of the day.  The WSJ had a column whose perspective was sobering:

Despite having done films on the Civil War and Vietnam, Ken Burns told me he was taken aback by the Revolution’s brutality. One of every three deaths was by bayonet. Warriors were often teenagers and the violence deeply personal, as when a young Vermont loyalist killed his best friend in hand-to-hand combat at the Battle of Bennington in 1777. Per capita there were more deaths in the Revolution than during the Civil War. Yet out of the carnage emerged the world’s first continent-spanning democracy.

Americans who want to dig deeper need not wait for November. There are many new books on the Revolutionary War that are well worth the read. The best are from Pulitzer-Prize winning military historian Rick Atkinson, who crafted a trilogy on the war for America.

He provides amazing detail and masterful staging. You’re in the action, seeing the violence that bitterly divided neighbors and families and understanding how close-run the war was. The vivid details, the intimacy, the sense of immediacy are a result of studious research. Like Mr. Burns, Mr. Atkinson mined the vast corpus of memoirs, letters, diaries and dispatches of the surprisingly literate combatants.

Being a Massachusetts native from the city 50 miles south of Bennington that has traditionally hosted a massive Fourth parade that dates back to 1801 and is often featured on national TV, I've enjoyed many firemens musters, marching bands, car shows and cook-outs on the day.  My Fourth of July birthday girl wife gets tired of my reminiscing about going to the local farm and getting a Baker's Dozen ears of corn for a buck in the '60s.  I was thrilled that our newly remodeled Safeway ran a special that beat the old price!  7 cent corn flew off the shelves yesterday.  I hope you got some.  Have a happy and pensive Fourth.

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[Joe]

PS On Nov. 16, Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt will premiere a six-part, 12-hour PBS documentary, “The American Revolution.” Written by Geoffrey Ward, it took eight years to make.