Word: yorktown
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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When the National Park Service began looking around for a sculptor to do a new figure for the top of the 97-ft. shaft of the Yorktown, Va. monument commemorating Washington's victory over Cornwallis, its eye fell on Norwegian-born Oskar Hansen, 61. Hansen was a monument-maker of some repute: he did the figures at Boulder Dam, a World War I memorial in Hinsdale, Ill., and a Columbus memorial in Rio de Janeiro. What was needed at Yorktown was a new statue of Liberty to replace the one decapitated by lightning...
Hansen was not concerned with such trivia. Said he: "To ask me to perpetrate, on the battlefield at Yorktown, a composition in sculpture bastardized according to the collective idea of a government bureaucracy, is asking of me not only the services of my body but the devastating perdition of my soul...
Cornwallis' army, badly worn by endless American harassment, and by such set-piece battles as Camden, S.C., Hobkirk's Hill, Cowpens, Guilford Courthouse, moved into Virginia and took up quarters at Yorktown. Washington was in New England contemplating an attack on New York-the French had landed 5.000 troops (who startled Americans by rigidly re- fraining from even minor thefts) to help him, and a big French fleet was preparing to sail from the West Indies. But Washington decided almost overnight to move against Cornwallis instead. The French war vessels moved to Virginia, too, and after five weeks...
...Revolution should have been cut by at least 200 pages; at times, Author Ward seems intent on recording every musket shot between' 1775 and 1782, and when he gets lost in minor southern skirmishes, it does not -always seem certain that he will ever find his way to Yorktown. But the book is saved by Ward's gift for narrative and by his lucidity in presenting military problems. His perspective is not as broad as Freeman's in George Washington, but he is a better writer...
...Germans are not rebels by nature. It is a notable fact of their strange national history that they have never had a successful revolution-there is no German counterpart of Yorktown, Naseby or the taking of the Bastille, and little of the democratic yearnings that brought such events about. By long tradition they respect effective authority-good or bad. When they cease to respect it, it is because they believe the force behind the authority is no longer there. While the Western powers still hold great authority under the occupation, they now fear to use it. Since we are dedicated...