First published in Milan, 1809. Botta's great history was the first complete and
accurate account of the American Revolution and the World War it generated. The American
Edition, translated from Italian by George Alexander Otis, was highly praised by
Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and James Madison, and mentioned in Jefferson's correspondence
with Adams.
Botta had access to much of the British and French correspondence,
news accounts, and diplomatic papers of the American War, and his great work provides
an invaluable, if not 100% accurate, view of the Revolution from the point of view
of the European powers.
Carlo Botta was a most remarkeable man: Physician, revolutionary
politician and statesman, historian and poet. He was appointed physician for the
French Army of the Alps and of Italy by Napoleon, went to the Mideast with the ill-fated
French expedition, and was vice-president of the National Assembly of the French
Empire. In view of Botta's position as a protegé of Napoleon, his treatment of George
Washington as morally and intellectualy superior to the despots of Europe is especially
interesting.
The digitized version of the 1826 Second Edition makes research much easier, with instant indexing of any selected word or phrase by computer, and excerpting of quotations without laborious retyping. Formatted for all popular Microsoft © word processing programs and also available as a DOS text file. Paper copies of maps from a later edition are included in the 2 disk mail version, and as jpeg image files in the download version.