Winner of the 2017 Harry M. Ward Book Prize:
Nathaniel
Philbrick, Valiant Ambition: George
Washington, Benedict Arnold, and the Fate of the American Revolution (New
York: Viking, 2016).
Nathaniel
Philbrick is one of America’s most versatile historians, an author at home in
subjects ranging from the voyage of the Mayflower, seafaring adventures, the
Battle of Little Big Horn, and Bunker Hill.
In this year’s prize-winning volume he has continued his interest in the
American Revolution. Valiant Ambition: George Washington,
Benedict Arnold, and the Fate of the American Revolution is the story of
the dramatic relationship between George Washington and Benedict Arnold—two men
who held the fate of the Revolution in their hands. Washington, of course, developed into the
leader who saved a cause that often hung on the edge of defeat, while the
shocking treason of Arnold, a brilliant battlefield leader and the commander-in-chief’s
once-trusted friend, almost assured that defeat. Philbrick has brilliantly explained the
different paths these two men chose and, as his title suggests, how those paths
shaped “the fate of the American Revolution.”
As he has in the past, Philbrick has taken a fascinating and important subject,
researched it deeply, and made it accessible to a wide audience in a
superbly-written narrative.
Honorable Mentions:
Robert F. Smith, Manufacturing
Independence: Industrial Innovation and the American Revolution (Yardley,
PA: Westholme Publishing, 2016).
Caroline Cox, Boy
Soldiers of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North
Carolina Press, 2016).
Stephen Howard Browne, The
Ides of War: George Washington and the Newburgh Crisis (Columbia, SC:
University of South Caroline Press, 2016).
Larrie D. Ferreiro, Brothers
at Arms: American Independence and the Men of France and Spain Who Saved It (New
York: Knopf, 2016).
Derek W.
Beck, Igniting the American Revolution: The War before Independence,
1775-1776 (Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, Inc., 2016).
