Overview

In the autumn of 1777, near Saratoga, New York, an inexperienced and improvised American army led by General Horatio Gates faced off against the highly trained British and German forces led by General John Burgoyne. The British strategy in confronting the Americans in upstate New York was to separate rebellious New England from the other colonies. Despite inferior organization and training, the Americans exploited access to fresh reinforcements of men and materiel, and ultimately handed the British a stunning defeat. The American victory, for the first time in the war, confirmed that independence from Great Britain was all but inevitable. Assimilating the archaeological remains from the battlefield along with the many letters, journals, and memoirs of the men and women in both camps, Dean Snow's 1777 provides a richly detailed narrative of the two battles fought at Saratoga over the course of thirty-three tense and bloody days. While the contrasting personalities of Gates and Burgoyne are well known, they are but two of the many actors who make up the larger drama of Saratoga. Snow highlights famous and obscure participants alike, from the brave but now notorious turncoat Benedict Arnold to Frederika von Riedesel, the wife of a British major general who later wrote an important eyewitness account of the battles. Snow, an archaeologist who excavated on the Saratoga battlefield, combines a vivid sense of time and place DL with details on weather, terrain, and technology DL and a keen understanding of the adversaries' motivations, challenges, and heroism into a suspenseful, novel-like account. A must-read for anyone with an interest in American history, 1777 is an intimate retelling of the campaign that tipped the balance in the American War of Independence.

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9780190900618

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Reviews

An easy-reading and well-structured look at the battles that produced the British defeat. * Washington Free Beacon * In his latest book, Snow takes a magnifying glass to the Saratoga campaign.... [He] presents Horatio Gates and John Burgoyne not as competing chess players but as complex individuals immersed in a larger group of individuals who struggle with social politics, ambiguous authority structures, and subordinates with mixed motives and loyalties.... Snow's narrative keeps readers engaged, start to finish. * Library Journal * As the action builds and the characters come into focus, readers will get caught up in their hopes and frustrations.... Military history lovers will appreciate Snow's explanations of how battles are fought. * Kirkus Reviews * [Dean Snow's] profiles of protagonists...bring the battle to life. * The New York Times * An exceptionally detailed narrative, following events day by day and, as the action intensifies, hour by hour. This chronological structure has the merit of making sense of a campaign for which the evidence is often complex and contradictory. The result is a vivid, almost novelistic, account. * Wall Street Journal *

Author Information

Dean Snow is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Penn State University and past president of the Society for American Archaeology. His previous books include Archaeology of Native North America and The Iroquois.

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