THE FATE OF THE DAY: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780, by Rick Atkinson

Does anyone doubt that the upcoming 250th anniversary of the American Revolution will produce a great deal of jingoistic nonsense parading as history? The bicentennial of our nation’s birth took place during a singularly self-reflective historical moment, just a year after the complete withdrawal of the United States from Vietnam and two years after Richard Nixon’s post-Watergate resignation.

But that didn’t stop the Ford administration from feting George Washington as a saint, militiamen as disciplined sharpshooters who mowed down faceless redcoats, and the 13 colonies as having defeated the most powerful empire on Earth in the name of all men being created equal. These myths, familiar to anyone who has heard the “Hamilton” cast album, were deliberately cultivated in the decades after the Revolution to foster American nationalism in a fractured body politic. Their promoters in 1976 hoped they would have the same effect.

There’s reason to think that next year’s celebration will up the ante. Days before the Department of Government Efficiency began dismantling the National Endowment for the Humanities, officials at the agency canceled the summer stipend program for researchers as part of “programming adjustments” made “in preparation for the celebration of the nation’s semi-quincentennial.” Yet readers who believe not only that historical accuracy and patriotism are compatible but also that acknowledging the complexity of the Revolution increases rather than diminishes the American victory need not dismay. For we have Rick Atkinson.

Casual browsers of the neighborhood bookstore could be forgiven for mistaking the first volume of Atkinson’s Revolution Trilogy as effluvia of the “America First” nostalgia machine. The blazing guns and vaguely antiquated font on the cover of volume one, “The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777” (2019), provide little hint of the vast, brilliantly illuminated world contained within its nearly 800 pages.

There is no better writer of narrative history than the Pulitzer Prize-winning Atkinson, who is able to transport readers to a different time and place without minimizing the differences of the past from the present. Deeply researched and meticulously structured, “The British Are Coming” is a sweeping account of the first 21 months of the war as seen from a remarkable number of perspectives: British and American, patriot and loyalist, Hessian and French. Atkinson considers the meaning of the conflict to the enslaved as well as the free — to officers, diplomats, soldiers, sailors, farmers and tradeswomen. Dozens of vibrant character sketches reveal the poverty of our clichéd understandings of the war’s heroes and villains.

At the end of volume one, Washington’s political skills are evident, but his battlefield decisions are mixed; he misrepresents the magnitude of patriot losses to the Continental Congress and passes blame around for defeats. His most successful commander, the dashing, fearless and thin-skinned Gen. Benedict Arnold, is repeatedly slighted. And in Atkinson’s telling, King George, far from being a mere monster or fool, is a conscientious monarch who firmly believes that the majority of colonists are loyal and wish him to put down an unwanted uprising.

Now, in volume two, “The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780,” we get an equally accomplished chronicle of the middle years of this multifront war, so compulsively readable that despite its length — again around 800 pages — it’s difficult to put down. We witness Washington mature as a commander; we come to understand why Arnold sells his allegiance; and we recognize King George’s quandary as his generals repeatedly fail to draw this ruinously expensive conflict to an end.

Just as enjoyable are Atkinson’s portraits of lesser-known figures, such as the “luminous and self-possessed” Baroness Frederika Riedesel, the wife of a commander of Hessian forces, who travels to America with three daughters under the age of 5. She rises to the challenges of war, cheering British troops, butchering pigs and dodging rattlesnakes, and befriending Thomas Jefferson, who sells her a piano so she can sing arias while confined to a cabin in Virginia by the Continental Army. Atkinson, who has a fine sense of humor — and irony — notes that two months after being released on parole by Congress, this Prussian-born supporter of the Tories gave birth to a fourth daughter whom she named “America.”

To label this book military history, or even American history, does it a disservice. While battles are described with enough detail to please fans of the genre (and enough skill to make both strategy and tactics legible for those who are not), Atkinson’s canvas is vast. Once the French enter the war in 1778, the American Revolution becomes a world conflict, involving Europe, India and the Caribbean. Atkinson covers the fallout from the battle for St. Lucia, where 1,500 French soldiers lost their lives, with as much care as the British capture of Savannah.

Just as impressive is his attention to minutiae: the danger of using green timber in ship building; the obstacles of finding housing in a city that’s burned to the ground; divisions within individual families over politics; and the intense suffering caused by hunger, exposure and disease on troops, displaced citizens and horses (his command of the equine world is prodigious).

Recognizing that the people of the 18th century had an intimate relationship with nature, Atkinson grounds his account in the weather, flora, fauna, tides, crops and night skies that provided meaning in their lives: “Woolly bear caterpillars” displaying “wide black rings” are harbingers of a harsh winter in New Jersey; stars above the Thames River “wheeled in their courses,” while “fields of maize, rye and flax” lie abandoned mid-harvest near the Green Mountains of Vermont.

Descriptions of events include sounds and smells as well as appearances. Where the Chesapeake Bay was wide, Atkinson writes, “the land could be smelled in loamy whiffs but not seen. Swans and sea eagles circled” the British fleet “and blue crabs swarmed by the many thousands near the surface.” “The Fate of the Day” evokes dozens of battles, almost none of which marked a conclusive shift in the fortunes of Britain or the patriots, but Atkinson’s ability to work at this level of detail keeps his depictions fresh. This is great history.

THE FATE OF THE DAY: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780 | By Rick Atkinson | Crown | 854 pp. | $42