THE DIARY OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION compiled by Frank Moore. 605 pages. Washington Square Press. $7.95.
For those who find the press coverage of Viet Nam—whether from Hanoi or Washington, Moscow or Saigon—to be biased, polemical, inaccurate or incendiary, this volume will prove a purgative historical point. Compiled in 1860 from the pages of Tory, Whig and British newspapers and out of print for nearly 100 years, it is a clip-book of reportage and editorials written during America's own, distinctly pre-Maoist "war for national liberation."
In the Revolutionary press, Tories and Redcoats were inevitably...