Robert Middlekauff is Preston Hotchkis Professor of American History Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. His book, The Glorious Cause: American Revolution, 1763-1789, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, offers a panoramic history of the conflict between England and America, highlighting the drama and anguish of the colonial struggle for independence. The new paperback edition is revised and expanded, covering fresh topics such as mob reactions to British measures before the War, military medicine, and American Indians. The book also has a new epilogue and updated bibliography. Check out Middlekauf’s recollections of writing the book below.
Writing this book brought great joy. To be sure, I sweated a lot in getting it done, but the whole process yielded satisfaction and pleasure. One of the surprises of the work was how rewarding writing military history was. Although most of the book deals with politics, defined broadly, about a third of it required telling the history of the war.
When I expressed some apprehension to C. Vann Woodward, then the general editor of the series, about my ability to write an intelligible military account, he reassured me. Writing military history was a fascinating activity, he said, and I should have no fear. He was speaking from experience, for he had written a history of the battle for Leyte Gulf in the Second World War. He was right—military history is fascinating and can be made to reveal much about a people (how and why they fought a revolutionary war).
When I was first asked to write the book by Woodward and Sheldon Meyer, the great Oxford University Press editor, I was engaged in something far removed from military history—religion in the American Revolution. The opportunity to do a big, i.e. long and complicated, book on the Revolution was too good to turn down. I put the book on religion and the Revolution aside and turned to the task of writing a narrative. Some of my research on religion made its way into The Glorious Cause, but most did not. A great subject like the Revolution demands a certain sweep, and a number of interests almost inevitably cannot be developed. But the rewards of doing a grand narrative of one of the most important events of modern history are many. Among them is the requirement to put together in coherent form varieties of history. They made giving up study of a narrower subject worthwhile. Of course, some day I can go back to religion—and maybe I will.
Some Glorious Recollections