"The American Revolution pitted an amateur army fighting for a new order of liberty and independence against two professional armies (British and Hessian) defending an old order of hierarchy and discipline. Until Washington crossed the Delaware, the triumph of the old order seemed inevitable. Thereaf"
"Northerners admired it as a symbol of freedom and union; southerners liked it as an image of liberty and independence. When the Civil War began, it was used to raise money for the Union Cause and the antislavery movement. The presence of an African American in the boat was not an accident; the artis"
"Emanuel Leutze also understood that something more was at issue in this event. The small battles near the Delaware were a collision between two discoveries about the human condition that were made in the early modern era. One of them was the discovery that people could organize a society on the basi"
"When the conflict began in earnest, during the late summer and fall of 1776, the forces of order won most of the major battles, but an army of free men won the winter campaign that followed. They did so not by imitating a European army of order, a profound error in historical interpretations of the "
"To study them with their general is to understand what George Washington meant when he wrote, "A people unused to restraint must be led; they will not be drove.""
"From these men George Washington learned the creed he followed all his life. It valued self-government, discipline, virtue, reason, and restraint. Historians have called it a stoic philosophy, but it was far removed from the ancient Stoicism of the slave Epictetus, who sought a renunciation of the w"
"Washington thought of liberty in the Stoic way, as independence from what he called "involuntary passion." He was a man of strong passions, which he struggled to keep in check. For him the worst slavery was to be in bondage to unbridled passion and not in "full possession of himself." George Washing"
"He deliberately kept others at a distance and advised his manager at Mount Vernon always to deal that way with inferiors. "To treat them civilly is no more than what all men are entitled to," Washington wrote,"but my advice to you is, to keep them at a proper distance; for they will grow upon famili"
书中很多地名都在princeton附近,包括washington crossing state park, princeton battlefield, Nassau Hall, Trenton, Quaker Bridge, Rocky Hill, Morven...而现在这些地方几乎无一例外开辟为纪念性公园,让现在的人可以更方便地走进历史。