Why Are Americans Uncurious About the Revolutionary War?

Geoffrey Norman, in the WSJ (Nov. 11, 2004):

The past decade or so has seen an explosion of titles about World War II. The Civil War, of course, has been keeping publishers busy for almost a century and a half. But the conflict without which the others would not have been possible--the American Revolution--seems a poor stepchild.

We are oddly uncurious about the military side of the war that made us a nation. While the founders are an inexhaustible seam of rich ore that biographers ceaselessly and productively mine, the battles, the generals and, especially, the soldiers dwell for the most part in literary obscurity.

Except, that is, in the works of Richard Ketchum, whose latest volume, "Victory at Yorktown" (Henry Holt & Co.), came out last month. It is Mr. Ketchum's fifth narrative of the Revolution. He began writing about the war in the '50s, when he produced "Decisive Day: The Battle for Bunker Hill." And, from there, he went on to write "The Winter Soldiers: The Battles for Trenton and Princeton," "Saratoga: Turning Point of America's Revolutionary War" and "Divided Loyalties: How the American Revolution Came to New York."

He also edited "The American Heritage Book of the Revolution," and it was this undertaking, back in 1957, that got him started on what has become his life's work.

Mr. Ketchum was a young magazine editor, back from his own war--he commanded a sub-chaser in the South Atlantic--and his colleague at American Heritage was the Civil War historian Bruce Catton. Mr. Catton edited the magazine, and Mr. Ketchum worked the book side of the operation. "We divided up American history, and I got the short straw," Mr. Ketchum says over lunch in Dorset, Vt., where he has lived, on and off, for almost 60 years. "It was at a lunch like this, except that Bruce was drinking martinis. Everybody drank at lunch back in those days--especially in the publishing business--but nobody did it quite like Bruce."

Mr. Ketchum says he admired Mr. Catton greatly, and "I tried to model my stuff after the way Bruce did his, . . . unsuccessfully, of course."

False modesty, perhaps. False, certainly. Mr. Ketchum's books have the narrative energy and vividly drawn characters that readers like in popular histories, and his books have all been critically well received, especially the Saratoga volume. But they have not achieved bestseller status, and Ken Burns has never called about a multipart series for PBS.
The reason, one thinks, lies not with the prose but with the material. The Revolution, for some reason, does not fire the American imagination. One can visit the Saratoga battlefield, 30 or 40 miles from where Mr. Ketchum is lunching, and walk it virtually alone. Gettysburg, on the other hand, is always crawling with visitors.

Why is that, one wonders.

"Oh, I think there are many reasons. If you wanted one that sort of stands for all the others, it is that the Revolution occurred before there was photography. The camera gives us an intimacy with the people who fought the Civil War that you just don't get from those formal, stylized paintings of the Revolution and the men who fought it."...