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We have now arrived on the cusp of the 250th anniversary of American independence, and speaking as a veteran of the 1976 Bicentennial, the word that comes most readily to mind for the celebrations 50 years later is flaccid. The excuse which usually follows is that we live today in a sea of political hatred, retribution, and instability, which makes it hard to celebrate the events that made it all possible.

But it’s worth remembering that in 1976, we had also just passed through the final debacle of Vietnam the year before; had just witnessed the national agony of Richard Nixon and Watergate two years before; and were caught on the horns of an economic crisis so mystifying that New York City was one day away from declaring bankruptcy. Yet, we managed to throw a stupendous national party that featured Operation Sail, a state visit from Queen Elizabeth II, and a Bicentennial Wagon Train that crossed the entire continent—from Oregon to Philadelphia. Bliss it was to be an American that year, and to be young—or at least, as I was, a young tour guide in 18th-century “small clothes” and formal white wig—was very heaven.

Certainly, a major reason for today’s chillier atmosphere lies with the way we have written the history of the American Revolution in the last 50 years. Like much of American historiography, historians of the Revolutionary era have increasingly moved from the history of individuals and moments to the social history of long-term economic and cultural movements, and that means battles and generals figure in substantially less prominent ways.

Another reason for the subdued atmosphere in 2025 is the turn in popular history and teaching toward political pessimism about the Revolution itself. The opening essays of The 1619 Project, for instance, recast the Revolutionary era in more critical terms than the Bicentennial did. But they are the product of a time of diminished confidence in American institutions, and so it becomes easier to attach the same discounted enthusiasm to the Revolution.

Which is not to say that the older mode of great-men-and-great-battles has been completely cast aside. George Washington seems to be the subject, on average, of a new book every year. Kevin Weddle’s The Compleat Victory: Saratoga and the American Revolution (2021) is the finest military history ever written on a Revolutionary battle; Stacy Schiff’s The Revolutionary: Sam Adams (2022) drags out of the political shadows one of the most talented rabble-rousers American politics ever produced; and the dean of American Revolutionary historians, Gordon Wood, provides one of the most cogent summaries of the move to independence in Power and Liberty: Constitutionalism in the American Revolution (2021).

Even America’s quondam enemies have harvested a fine crop of specialty biographies. Andrew Roberts’s remarkable 2021 biography of George III almost makes the “last king of America” likable; Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy presents us with a collective biography of 10 British generals in The Men Who Lost America (2014) who were certainly not the incompetent Colonel Blimps they have often been made out to be.

And then there is Rick Atkinson.

Atkinson made his first career in journalism, covering defense issues in the 1980s. In 1982, he snagged a Pulitzer for a series of stories on a Vietnam-devastated West Point class, stories which became his first book, The Long Gray Line: The American Journey of West Point’s Class of 1966.

The success of The Long Gray Line created too great a temptation not to return to the same pump, and after leaving newspapers in 1999, he set to work on a massive narrative trilogy on the U.S. Army in the Second World War’s European theater, An Army at Dawn (2002), The Day of Battle (2007), and The Guns at Last Light (2013). It was from there that he took an even longer step back in time, to the American Revolution, with the first book in a new trilogy, The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777, in 2019. The Fate of the Day, just released, is the second volume of Atkinson’s Revolutionary trilogy.

It is one of the conceits of journalism that reporters write “the first draft of history.” It is one of the conceits of historians that we are likely to respond, “Yes, and that’s why historians are around to write the final draft and correct all the mistakes.” The same, however, should not be said of Atkinson. He has the journalist’s stylistic flair but a stupendous appetite for research that would put many a gray-haired Ph.D. to shame. Even more, he has an admirable reserve of judgment which prevents him from rushing too far, too fast.

Above all, for this 250th anniversary, Atkinson loves the ins-and-outs of military planning, strategy, and tactics, not unmixed with a canny eye for the flow of politics and political personalities, whether in Philadelphia, London, or Versailles. (He is, after all, an Army brat, like myself.) The result, in The Fate of the Day, is a massive, and massively enjoyable, excursion into the embattled history of the American republic, its imperial British enemy, and its opportunistic ally, France.

It is one of Atkinson’s convictions in both The British Are Coming and The Fate of the Day that Britain and its leaders were, even with the keenest of intentions, their own worst enemies. Britain’s North American colonies emerged from the trauma of the Seven Years’ War as grateful and devoted children of the Hanoverian crown and its newest representative, George III. What the imperial planners in London never quite fathomed was that this reverence was built on generations of improvised self-government in America, which the Americans saw no reason to surrender once the British government decided to impose an unprecedented series of direct taxes on them. It was not that the taxes were necessarily onerous; it was that they were imposed roughshod, without a by-your-leave to American habits.

It exploded when the Boston Tea Party turned to the outright destruction of property. No one was angered more seriously than the king, who insisted that unless the Americans were brought to heel, the rest of the empire—Ireland, India, and the Caribbean—would go the same way.

The British generals to whom this task was given—Sir William Howe, Sir Henry Clinton, Earl Cornwallis, “Gentlemanly Johnny” Burgoyne—were neither nitwits nor tyrants, and if we are to judge by the opening chapters of The Fate of the Day, they were remarkably close to winning their war in 1777. Burgoyne’s capture of Fort Ticonderoga in July 1777 should have guaranteed the success of his plan to move down the Hudson River Valley and cut off rebellious New England from the rest of the American rebel states; Howe’s dramatic combined-arms operation to capture Philadelphia steamrolled George Washington’s Continental Army at Brandywine in September, threw off a counterattack at Germantown in October, and consigned the Continentals to their dreadful winter encampment at Valley Forge.

But Howe’s adventure to Philadelphia left him unable to support Burgoyne when “Gentlemanly Johnny” was forced into surrender at Saratoga in October 1777. Howe himself had already concluded that the war was unwinnable and never lifted a finger to disturb Washington at Valley Forge. The Saratoga victory convinced the French that the British were vulnerable to a serious effort to recover France’s New World empire, and with the French entrance into the war, the principal theaters of operations had to be shifted elsewhere by Britain. Britain’s generals in America would still win a few dramatic victories, but they would lose the biggest battle at Yorktown in 1781, and after that, American independence only required the official stamp of the 1783 peace treaty.

The Fate of the Day stretches from the high point of British military fortunes in America through a steady slide that even the British capture of Savannah in 1778 and Charleston in 1780 cannot reverse. If some of this conjures up faint echoes of a similar slide of military fortunes in Indochina almost two centuries later, that is probably not a misjudgment. Along the way, though, Atkinson wants us to see how much the Revolution worked a kind of political, military, and diplomatic alchemy in America. In a new republic plagued by bickering, we found strength out of the bickering. In a land of farmers, immigrants, and merchants, we found the most unlikely and marvelous leaders. In a crisis that gave plenty of excuse for replacing one monarchy with another, we found a general whose political reserve never allowed him to step across the line that would undo a republic (just as Cromwell undid the English republic more than a century before). Atkinson makes no secret of his frank admiration for Washington, and largely because Washington understood a single basic fact about his soldiers and his countrymen—that they must be reasoned with, not bludgeoned.

Given the shortness of time, we will probably not mount a celebration in 2026 that matches the raucous scale of 1976. But having in hand Rick Atkinson’s new trilogy—and especially The Fate of the Day—will be no small compensation.

 

The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780
by Rick Atkinson
Crown, 880 pp., $42

Allen C. Guelzo is the Thomas W. Smith Distinguished Research Scholar in the James Madison Program at Princeton University and a Non-Resident Fellow of the American Enterprise Institute.

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Mark Twain (real name Samuel Clemens) continues to make news, whether in unabashed reverence by comedian Conan O’Brien as he accepted this year’s Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, or in defamation by countless school boards who have banned The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which uses the “n-word” 219 times.

Huck, first published in America in January 1885, also inspired Percival Everett’s wildly successful 2024 novel James, a POV re-pivot focusing on Huck’s black friend and escaped slave, Jim. In comedy and contemporary literature, Twain’s shadow remains a long one, 115 years after his death.

For years, biographer Ron Chernow has been wrestling with Twain’s shadow, and now his latest effort, Mark Twain, at well over 1,000 pages, leaves no archival stone unturned. As he has done with J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, and Ulysses S. Grant, Chernow, 76, takes five to eight years to complete his meticulously researched biographies.

But for Twain, I did have my doubts. If you’re familiar with Chernow’s work, you understand that banking and politics appear to be his comfort zones, and I wondered if his choice—a fierce satirist enamored with teenage girls—had been affected by how Twain had helped former president Grant with his memoirs. That story was laid out wonderfully by Mark Perry’s 2004 dual bio Grant and Twain.

When it comes to Twain, so much has already been documented. As Chernow notes in his acknowledgments, Twain, upon his death in 1910, left behind hundreds of unpublished manuscripts. The Mark Twain Papers over at Berkeley has already scoured through thousands of pages, organizing Twain’s autobiography into three volumes, and NewSouth Books saw a market large enough to publish Huck Finn without the n-word.

It’s worth noting that, regarding Huck’s Jim as a character, Chernow is succinct: “Whatever the shortcomings of Twain’s presentation of Jim, the Black man emerges as the morally superior figure in the story, surrounded by an appalling menagerie of whites who cheat, scheme, lie, and kill.”

Mark Twain is so much more than the eccentric writer who wrote Innocents Abroad, Huck Finn, and Tom Sawyer; he is a cultural institution. Raised in “sleepy” Hannibal, Missouri, Twain watched as the small town came to life whenever a steamboat chugged its way up and down the Mississippi River. He dreamed of being a steamboat pilot, and it was this profession Chernow highlights where Twain found the most peace and freedom, writing a distant second. “In truth,” wrote Twain, “every man and woman and child has a master, and worries and frets in servitude; but in the day I write of, the Mississippi pilot had none.”

When not on the river, Twain, son of a distant, cash-strapped father—who died when Sam was 11—and adoring mother, became a prankster around town, ever craving the attention it brought. Eventually, young Sam settled into the escapism that the world of books provides.

As Chernow eloquently puts it:

In the manner of all autodidacts, Sam Clemens educated himself by reading from passion, not duty. He retained his boyhood fondness for The Adventures of Robin Hood, both the “quaint & simple … fragrant & woodsy England” as well as its characters, “the most darling sweet rascals that ever made crime graceful in this world.” He and close friend Will Bowen would “undress & play Robin Hood in our shirt-tails, with lath swords, in the woods on Holliday’s Hill on those long summer days.” Confined in the remote little town, Sam escaped into the far away exploits of Robinson Crusoe, The Arabian Nights, and The Count of Monte Cristo, which gave intimations of the boundless world “curtained away” beyond Hannibal.

Chernow has an ability, musical almost, to deploy a quote just long enough (note that three-dot ellipsis) to give the moment its veracity yet not impede upon narrative momentum. Another critical part of a Chernow reading experience is interacting with his endnotes. There are 75 pages of them, carried in two columns per page. Each endnote is thrifty, and the section includes a glossary of acronyms at the start. In the paragraph above, there are three endnotes—citing letters from three primary sources—clearly showing where the quotations come from.

If you think this is standard, well, you haven’t been reading a lot of biographies lately. It should be. The least a biographer can do is pave the way for someone else to keep the journey going.

It was after Twain’s father died that his career working as a printer started. Twain’s much older brother Orion was already working as a printer and sending money home from St. Louis. Twain preferred work to school, his time in the classroom a short-lived exercise, with Twain only attending “part-time” until he was 14.

Chernow brings to life these no-wage years working as a printer’s apprentice at various newspapers in a chapter aptly called “Printer’s Devil.” It’s also during this time when Twain gets to know, for better or worse, Orion, who moved back to Hannibal and eventually started the Hannibal Journal. Orion, 10 years older than Twain, had been affected far more than his younger brother when it came to their father’s personal and financial shortcomings. As Chernow puts it, “the shadow of his father’s hardship fell heavily across his life.”

The relationship between the brothers is fascinating, and Chernow wisely builds upon the work of Philip Ashley Fanning’s Mark Twain and Orion Clemens: Brothers, Partners, Strangers, and uses letters from various archives across the United States to give each brother their own voice: “Both Orion and Sam were dreamers,” writes Chernow, “but Sam had a tough, hardheaded practicality that would enable him to succeed, whereas Orion was an endearing oddball whose naivete would always serve as a whetstone that sharpened his younger brother’s cynicism.”

Twain lived a packed life. At 17, out of frustration toward Orion and a desire for adventure, he left Hannibal for New York and Philadelphia, writing articles and taking printing jobs, exasperated by the explosion of immigrants. “I always thought the eastern people were patterns of uprightness,” Twain wrote to Orion, “but I never before saw so many whisky-swilling, God-despising heathens as I find in this part of the country.” Chernow also notes Twain’s evolving feelings over seeing black people free for the first time. Back then at least, Twain preferred talking with “a good, old-fashioned negro” back in Missouri.

Eventually, Twain went back to work for Orion, now married and living in Keokuk, Iowa. Chernow could have filled another thousand pages tracking Twain’s movements in his 20s; the printer/riverboat pilot/writer/pro-Confederacy militia soldier (for two weeks)/Nevada silver rush miner was in constant motion. Chernow notes “early February 1863” as the time when the first “Mark Twain” byline appeared in print. To Twain, the pseudonym, as Chernow puts it, “was short and melodious—a perfect spondee.”

By 31, Twain had slowed down… a little, and was looking for companionship. “Beneath his ribald mockery,” Chernow writes, “Twain was a suppressed romantic who needed a spotless soul to worship.” To describe Twain’s marriage to Olivia Langdon, or “Livy,” Chernow again dives into archival correspondence, while also using long-ago efforts of Twain estate editor Dixon Wecter and his 1949 collection, The Love Letters of Mark Twain. The result is a sweeping, 34-year love story that somehow endured losing their first-born son Langdon at 19 months. Twain’s devotion to Livy is admirable, but more so was Livy’s patience and stamina. How she somehow managed Twain’s lifelong wanderlust deserves its own book, and for readers curious about Livy’s perspective on her marriage with Twain, a great place to start is Barbara Snedecor’s Gravity: Selected Letters of Olivia Langdon Clemens, published in 2023.

As far as Chernow documents, Twain was faithful to Livy, and when she passed in 1904, the then mega-famous writer was devastated, and for the last six years of his life, he appeared at times embittered and lost, his north star vanished.

Twain, writes Chernow, had a “lifelong fixation on chaste teenage girls on the eve of adulthood,” and the biographer, credit to him, does not shy away from this shadowy, even “creepy” aspect of Twain’s personality. In fact, Chernow leans in, mentioning how one biographer, Gary Scharnhorst, accused Twain of being a “latent pedophile” whose actions were shielded from public view by his inner circle (another Twain biographer, Ron Powers, shied away from the topic). With an assist from Karen Lystra’s comprehensive Twain study, Dangerous Intimacy, Chernow manages to occupy middle ground on this issue, presenting just enough material for the reader to reach their own conclusion.

Twain was far from a perfect soul. He was bizarre, irreverent, boundary-pushing, and distinctly American. Chernow rightly ends with Twain’s greatest magician’s trick, completing his own 400,000-word autobiography and scheduling it to be published 100 years after his death. As Chernow puts it, “His clever tongue, full of vinegar and wit, suddenly spoke from beyond the grave. Even in death, he refused to yield the spotlight and showed with a flourish his posthumous mastery of public relations.”

Twain’s strongest spiritual successor was arguably satirist Kurt Vonnegut (1922–2007). In a 1987 conversation with Hank Nuwer, Vonnegut, whose curly hair and mustache look was inspired by Twain (with a dash of Hal Holbrook), said he was “very suspicious” of “people’s fondness for Mark Twain, because everybody pretends to have read him and very few people have.” Indeed, unless your name is Ken Burns, or past Twain biographers Scharnhorst and Powers, Twain remains as familiar to the public as a postage stamp. With this monumental book, Chernow gives Twain dimension and verve.

A favorite “Twainism” of mine comes from one of his notebooks, dated 1886: “My books are water; those of the great geniuses is wine. Everybody drinks water.” I’ll go ahead and declare Chernow’s Twain a smooth lager that goes down easy after a long day, but it doesn’t merit a six-pack. That’s because the power of Mark Twain lies far more in his own voice delivered by his own pen than in the hardscrabble life he led. The stakes in Twain feel smaller compared with Chernow’s Grant or Alexander Hamilton. There’s a level of tedium here that Chernow, despite his incredible skill, cannot escape. To take one example, Chernow does well in laying out what he deems “the bloodiest literary feud” of Twain’s life, between Twain and journalist Edward H. House. Again, Chernow leans on a strong secondary source, James L. Huffman’s A Yankee in Meiji Japan, and combines it with archival correspondence between the two men. But Burr vs. Hamilton this is not.

Adjust your stakes, find a comfortable recliner, and open that beer. Chernow is back, but in a minor key.

Mark Twain
by Ron Chernow
Penguin Press, 1,200 pp., $45

Patrick Parr is the author of Malcolm Before X and One Week in America: The 1968 Notre Dame Literary Festival and a Changing Nation.

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The war-torn country is on its knees. Why is Brussels breaking its legs?

The war-torn country is on its knees. Why is Brussels breaking its legs?

A Book Review of ‘The Trump Revolution: A New Order of Great Powers’ by Aleksandr Dugin

A Review of ‘The Trump Revolution: A New Order of Great Powers’ by Aleksandr Dugin

Minister of Defense Antti Häkkänen said Moscow’s provocative actions at sea and in the air are escalating tensions in the Baltic Sea.

Minister of Defense Antti Häkkänen said Moscow’s provocative actions at sea and in the air are escalating tensions in the Baltic Sea.

Recent weeks have seen multiple drone strikes across Russia, including attacks on a chemical plant in the Tula region, and strikes on the Energia plant in Lipetsk, a key defence industry site.

Recent weeks have seen multiple drone strikes across Russia, including attacks on a chemical plant in the Tula region, and strikes on the Energia plant in Lipetsk, a key defence industry site.