Volume 35, Number 20 · December 22, 1988
In the Dawn's Early Light
By Ira Gruber
The First Salute
by Barbara W. Tuchman
Knopf, 347 pp., $22.95
For more than thirty years, Barbara Tuchman has shown just how popular history can be made to be. She chooses interesting subjects, ranging from the follies of the Vietnam War to the plagues of the fourteenth century, and evokes their drama and importance; she is candid about her own prejudices, and she has an exceptional gift for telling a story. In The First Salute Tuchman has brought her special talents to 'an unfamiliar field,' the War for American Independence. She has not written another comprehensive history of the war, nor has she analyzed closely any one part of that war. Instead, she presents three loosely connected narratives inspired by an event that took place on the small Dutch West Indian island of St. Eustatius. There, in November 1776, four months after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the Dutch garrison, on orders from the Governor, fired a salute to mark the arrival of a warship of the United States. This was the first official recognition of the independence of the United States by a foreign nation. It marked the beginning of events that brought the Dutch into the American War, changed the strategy of the British navy, and led at last to the decisive cooperation of French and American forces at Yorktown in 1781.
Review, 2980 words
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