Historian digs deep into Revolutionary War

As he researched the first volume of his planned American Revolution trilogy, Rick Atkinson traveled from the battlefields of Massachusetts to London’s Windsor Castle, where he looked through the papers of King George III.

“I was there for a month and every day would show my badge at Henry VIII Gate and climb the Round Tower,” he says. “And there are the papers. It’s a very tactile sense of being in George’s presence.”

“The British Are Coming” is Atkinson’s ninth book, and his first since completing his acclaimed “Liberation Trilogy” on World War II. He has been praised for combining deep research with a vivid writing style.

“The British Are Coming” adds to a surprisingly thin genre: a multivolume work centered on the Revolutionary War itself. Countless books have been written on the founders, and multivolume biographies date back to the early years of the country: John Marshall, the Supreme Court chief justice, wrote five volumes on George Washington that came out in the early 1800s. But the most acclaimed books on the Revolutionary War have been singlevolume publications extending beyond the British surrender, from Robert Middlekauff’s “Glorious Cause” to John Ferling’s “Leap in the Dark.”

“Most people think of the revolution as just a series of well-known battles,” says Nathaniel Philbrick, whose books include “Bunker Hill” and “In the Hurricane’s Eye,” which covers the war’s conclusion. “They know about Lexington and Concord, and somehow things get to Valley Forge, then other stuff happens “The British Are Coming” By Rick Atkinson (Henry Holt & Co., $40)

and the British surrender at Yorktown. But of course it didn’t happen that way, and I don’t see a lot of multivolume treatments on it.”

Atkinson acknowledges that the Revolutionary War, a means to separate from the English rather than a desire for conquest, differed from World War II “in magnitude, breadth and consequence.”

“One was a global conflagration that left 60 million dead; the other was an obscure insurgency on the edge of the world,” he says. “But in fact I find that as a writer, war is war. The struggle for survival, the fear, the exhaustion, the boredom, the utter misery, the loneliness — all are really of a piece when it comes to combat. The mystical bond between leaders and the led, the willingness to die for a comrade more than dying for a cause, the struggle to stay dry, stay fed, stay low — these are eternal verities in war.”

Atkinson, 66, considered writing about the conflict in the Pacific before deciding that it didn’t have “the same hold” on his interest. He instead looked to the American Revolution, a favorite subject since childhood, as a way of exploring “who we are, where we came from and what our ancestors were willing to die for.”

“The British Are Coming” covers the years 1775 to 1777, from the first shots at Lexington and Concord to the aftermath of the battles of Trenton and Princeton, when George Washington’s battered army managed to push back against the British and revive the colonists’ hopes. Atkinson’s narrative blends general reflections on war with the most specific touches, whether it’s the shadows cast by the elm trees on Boston Common or the amount of rum (2 ounces) that troops in Princeton, New Jersey, were encouraged to drink to maintain their courage.

“Those details are the mother’s milk of narrative writing,” Atkinson says. “One of the things I found was claims made by widows of men killed in Lexington and Concord. You have widows putting in for trousers or his pipe or his musket. These are small fragments of a world destroyed, of an individual family. And it tells you something about the way society worked.”

Rick Atkinson