In ‘American Revolution,’ Sullivan crosses the Delaware and I-78

Robert Sullivan is a master of the wandering digression.

In an age of sound bites and Twitter — when less is sold as more — that may not seem like praise. But for patient and curious readers, Sullivan's My American Revolution: Crossing the Delaware and I-78 is a delightful and quirky history lesson.

It's a personal celebration of less-celebrated sites in the revolution. Lexington and Concord and Valley Forge may attract more tourists, but Sullivan, who lives in Brooklyn, makes a case for the revolutionary significance of forgotten and neglected sites in New York and New Jersey.

That's not as parochial as it appears. Sullivan avoids the boosterism that afflicts most local history. He explores bigger themes: how the past can be seen in present-day landscapes and how simple things like weather and terrain change the outcomes of war. He embraces history as a "mess, semi-organized chaos."

Sullivan, who knows his way around research libraries and backroads, takes readers on detours to places like Jersey's Watchung Mountains, the winter refuge of Washington's troops after they crossed the Delaware. He describe the Watchungs as "America's Revolutionary War capital," crucial to Washington's strategy of winning, or as Sullivan puts it more precisely, "not losing" the war against the British.

He notes that New York City is "where Washington officially began the Revolution as well as the place where it ended, on Evacuation Day, a day celebrated for a century and a half with parades and flags throughout New York City, though no longer."

Not all the details are telling. But along the way, Sullivan digresses on Washington's teeth, which were not wooden, but "in point of fact made of gold and ivory and lead, as well as of teeth taken from horses, donkeys and his slaves." (File that under what you didn't learn in school.)

He introduces obscure figures, such as Thomas DeVoe, a 19th-century New York butcher and author, a "street historian, a guerrilla culler of old journals and papers," who confessed to an obsessive "history problem."

Sullivan, too, may suffer from a history problem — at his own peril. He messes up his back on a one-man, 33-mile re-enactment of Washington's march from the Delaware to Morristown, N.J., where the Continental Army endured the brutal winter of 1779-1780. (With 28 snowstorms, it was far worse than Valley Forge.)

He becomes obsessed with the idea of long-distance signaling, using sunlight reflected in a handheld mirror. From the Watchungs, he tries but repeatedly fails to signal to his teenage daughter, across the Hudson and Manhattan, all the way in Brooklyn.

When at last she sees his signal, readers will celebrate, just as New Yorkers once celebrated Evacuation Day every Nov. 25.