My American Revolution: A Modern Expedition Through History's Forgotten Battlegrounds

by Robert Sullivan

Overview

Named a Best Book of the Year by The Wall Street Journal

Americans tend to think of the Revolution as a Massachusetts-based event orchestrated by Virginians, but in fact the war took place mostly in the Middle Colonies—in New York and New Jersey and parts of Pennsylvania. In My American Revolution, Robert Sullivan delves into this first Middle America, digging for a glorious, heroic past in the urban, suburban, and sometimes even rural landscape of today.

Sullivan's history is personal, anecdotal, experiential. He visits the down-home reenactment of the crossing of the Delaware, which has taken place each year for the past half century, and uncovers the fact behind the myth. He camps in New Jersey backyards, hikes through lost "mountains," and wrecks his back—then evacuates illegally from Brooklyn to Manhattan by handmade boat. He recounts a Brooklyn historian's failed attempt to memorialize a colonial Maryland regiment; a tattoo artist's more successful use of a colonial submarine, which resulted in his 2007 arrest by the New York City police and the FBI; and the life of Philip Freneau, the first (and not great) poet of American independence, who died in a swamp in the snow.

Like an almanac, My American Revolution moves through the calendar of American independence with the eternally charming Robert Sullivan as our guide. This is a fiercely individual and often hilarious journey; in the process of making our revolution his, Sullivan shows us how alive our own history is, right under our noses.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250037701
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	09/03/2013
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	8.10(w) x 5.40(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Robert Sullivan is the author of Rats, The Meadowlands, A Whale Hunt, and most recently, The Thoreau You Don't Know. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, New York magazine, A Public Space, and Vogue, where he is a contributing editor. He was born in Manhattan and now lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Editorial Reviews

Historically fascinating and deeply personal.” —The New Yorker

“A delightful and quirky history lesson.” —USA Today

“It's difficult to resist this eclectic, highly personal examination of America's war of independence.” —The Boston Globe

“The reader more or less returns to the starting point, but with a brand-new perspective. What a trip!” —The New York Times Book Review

“A nostalgic, witty, and always informative topographic retrospective of the sites pertinent to the American Revolution takes Vogue contributing editor and journalist Sullivan to the action seen by the middle colonies especially—New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey...Sullivan's historic anecdotes form a loose-limbed, irreverent, surprising take on American history.” —Publishers Weekly

“Engaging, humorous, and often surprising...Sullivan combines solid historical knowledge, sensitivity to the physical landscape, and a wry sense of the absurdities inherent in mythmaking to provide a thoroughly enjoyable and original perspective.” —Booklist

“Historical reenactors refer to what they do as ‘living history,' the idea being that it's easier to learn from a three-dimensional experience than is from a book or lecture, because it establishes a physical connection with the past. It was something like this desire, familiar to most amateur history buffs, that drove Sullivan...to relive some of the iconic deeds of American Revolution, such as crossing the East River to Manhattan in a small boat in homage to George Washington's escape after the disastrous Battle of Brooklyn. Sullivan is himself a New Yorker, and his zeal for local history comes across in the way that he treats each task with enthusiastic respect. For him, hiking through New Jersey along the path of Washington's troops is more than a hike—it's a communion with our shared past that bears an importance beyond mere observation. This is half history and half just good fun...It's inspiring to watch him attempt to capture even the tiniest bit of the audacity of the American founding.” —Nick Mancusi, The Daily Beast

“Robert Sullivan has interesting ideas, and sometimes he makes interesting books out of them...Now Sullivan turns his attention to the American Revolution, though no one familiar with his work will be surprised that his approach to it is almost entirely eccentric. My American Revolution is about as far from a conventional account of that conflict as one could get. Instead it is an episodic portrait of the war as it may have been at the time and as it is understood—or misunderstood—by many of us now . . . This book is about...an effort to find the past in the present, to reconcile each to the other. At its best, My American Revolution accomplishes this with grace and humor...[Sullivan] certainly accomplishes one of his main purposes: to make us see not merely the revolution but also ourselves in new light.” —Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post

“[An] eccentric, entertaining take on the war...He highlights events he can retrace, including the famous river crossing and Washington's subsequent trek to New Jersey's Watchung Mountains, as well as the Battle of Brooklyn and the general's journey to New York for his inauguration. He's a well- informed guide you appreciate as much for his asides and digressions.” —Jeffrey Burke, Businessweek

“My American Revolution is a brilliant rereading of an entire landscape. It offers an ingenious approach to history by suggesting that noticing and retracing with care and wit, finding hints and clues, are ways of re-creating the past in all its complexity. It is, on the one hand, a funny book, filled with mishap and adventure, but it is also deeply and seriously engaged with capturing the spirit of a place. It deserves to become one of the indispensable books about New York.” —Colm Tóibín, author of Brooklyn

“In his meditative, elliptical way, Sullivan does with the Revolutionary era what Tony Horwitz did with the Civil War in his 1998 book, Confederates in the Attic—he tracks down the re-enactors, amateur historians and oddballs (himself included) for whom the drums of war never really stopped beating.” —Stephen Heyman, T: The New York Times Style Magazine

“In his uplifting new book, My American Revolution: Crossing the Delaware and I-78, Robert Sullivan...mixes local history and personal examination. His outcome is...ecstatic. Sullivan claims that the real Revolutionary War wasn't fought in and around Boston but in the middle colonies of New York and New Jersey, his lifelong haunts. He scours these areas for the War of Independence that time forgot, ‘going out on reconnaissance missions into the landscape that might not seem ancient, camouflaged now as it is by cities and strip malls, by toxic waste sites and high-end commercial properties.' Such historical excursions grant Sullivan a ‘more resonant awareness, a deeper realization of the landscape not offered in a sentence, or on a chart, but in [his] bones.'...Sullivan restores to their original brightness figures on the verge of disappearing from history...Rebelling against mainstream accounts of the war, Sullivan realizes that revolutionary energy still thrives in the peripheries...Sullivan's exuberant character sketches are as irresistible as they are informative. He is the history teacher you wanted but never had: funny, unpretentiously curious, able to imagine the past with astonishing vitality—a true poet of living history as well as a consummate subversive, showing us how recoveries of the abandoned past are essential for liberty and justice. The people you never heard of, it turns out, can be the ones you most need to hear.” —Eric G. Wilson, The Minneapolis Star Tribune

“As Mr. Sullivan traverses the forests, mountains and rivers in and around New York City, he provides a glimpse into the historical minutia of the Revolution as a history buff, a 21st-century patron, a father, a son. This is a work about digging up lost facts and understanding their purpose in the larger framework of what the American Revolution was and how it is remembered...Writing in a conversational tone, Mr. Sullivan leaves the arguments to the historians, the details of Revolutionary paintings and writings to art and literary scholars, placing his own experiences of crossing the Delaware and Interstate 78 at the heart of this work. My American Revolution is a perfect read for someone looking to learn a few neat details of the American Revolution.” —Evi Heilbrunn, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“[Sullivan is] a fine, and fun, traveling partner and guide. Also, a superb writer and deeply dedicated historian.” —Nancy Rommelmann, The Oregonian

“[Sullivan] explains the world amusingly; it's a place where progress is triggered by basic human desires...and carried out by clever people in entertaining historical anecdotes.” —Bruce Barcott, The New York Times Book Review

From the Publisher

A nostalgic, witty, and always informative topographic retrospective of the sites pertinent to the American Revolution takes Vogue contributing editor and journalist Sullivan (The Thoreau You Don’t Know) to the action seen by the middle colonies especially—New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey. Years of reflective walks and “site-inspired epiphanies” inform Sullivan’s research, as he traced Washington’s army crossing the Delaware, marching to engage the British at the battles of Trenton and Princeton, and into the winter refuge at Morristown, in the Watchung Mountains. In the second part, Sullivan discourses by turns on the seasons of the revolution, not in any chronological fashion, e.g., spring 1789 marked the inauguration of the new president in a vastly changing downtown Manhattan, which Sullivan reached by his own personal inaugural barge from Elizabeth, N.J., to Wall Street; summer sounded the anniversary of the disastrous rout at the Battle of Brooklyn; autumn ushered a rueful time of remembrance for soldiers and prisoners; and winter brings to mind the appalling hard winter at Valley Forge endured by the army. As infatuated by later decades’ of monuments, statues, and artist’s renderings of the revolutionary landscape as he is by the actual history, Sullivan delights in deep digressions into personal moments of discovery, such as viewing Larry Rivers’s controversial Washington Crossing the Delaware at the Museum of Modern Art or coming upon the lists of evolving early Dutch and British markets published by butcher turned street historian Thomas F. DeVoe. Sullivan’s historic anecdotes form a loose-limbed, irreverent, surprising take on American history, most fun in the footnotes. Agent: Eric Simonoff. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

In a roving, digressive memoir, Vogue contributor Sullivan (The Thoreau You Don't Know: What the Prophet of Environmentalism Really Meant, 2009, etc.) traces Revolutionary War history in and around New York and New Jersey. Looking down from the top of the Empire State Building, the author saw a war landscape he believed to be neglected. Inspired to bring the Revolutionary War history of his hometown into his own present, Sullivan embarked on a long, twisting journey. Though his motives were somewhat muddled from the beginning, his recreational, relaxed plan was to cross the Delaware River, venture into the mountains, and finish the journey by visiting sites and memories inside New York City. Readers are sure to learn plenty from his travels, including little-celebrated battles and long-forgotten soldiers whose stories never made history textbooks. Throughout, the author meanders through his recounting of history, never ignoring a possible detour. In one instance, the fact that a building bearing a Revolutionary War plaque now houses a Trader Joe's store leads to a footnote about colonists boycotting imported English goods and then ends in an anecdote about the kidnapping of Theo Albrecht, the now-deceased former owner of Trader Joe's. Much of the book reads like a journal edited to add more information rather than to streamline thoughts. Considering Sullivan's obvious passion for many of the tangential subjects--associated art and literature, for example--a book of essays might have been a more appropriate project for a general audience. Tailor-made for trivia lovers and readers who don't mind the scenic route. Those looking for a more straightforward narrative are likely to be frustrated.

Kirkus Reviews