Books: Battles for Freedom

THE WAR OF THE REVOLUTION (2 VoLS.,989 pp.) — ChrisTopher Ward — Macmillan ($15).

In the igth century the best U.S. history was written by gifted amateurs; in the 20th century the professors took over, made history more scientific—and usually less interesting. Christopher Ward, a Delaware lawyer who died in 1943, was one of the last of the amateurs who, like Douglas Southall Freeman, have poked about in the national past for sheer love of it. Ward spent the last years of his life on a military history of the American Revolution, and the...