Carlo Botta’s History of the War of the Independence of the United States of America occupies a singular place among early interpretations of the American founding: it is among the first sustained attempts to comprehend the Revolution as a coherent moral and political whole. Composed by an Italian historian formed in the classical tradition, Botta does not write as a distant observer cataloguing facts, but as one who understands that great political events demand an equally great form of historical understanding.

The work is structured with the gravity and unity of purpose characteristic of ancient history. Like Livy recounting the founding of Rome or Thucydides discerning the logic of imperial decay, Botta presents the American Revolution as a drama of republican principle. Statesmen, generals, and assemblies are treated as bearers of intelligible moral and political choices whose consequences define the future of liberty and the project of self-government. The Revolution, in this rendering, is not a sequence of contingencies but a decisive moment in the long argument between self-government and imperial rule.

It is no accident that President Thomas Jefferson regarded Botta’s history as the “common manual” for the American people to understand the American Revolution. He understood that a people does not long preserve its founding unless it possesses a shared account of what that founding meant. Botta’s work, widely read in the early republic, supplied precisely such an account. It translated the events of the Revolution into a language at once dignified and intelligible, capable of forming the proper character for free self-governing people rather than merely informing a curious audience about historical events.

This modern recovery of Botta’s original manuscript—restored through the literal translation of George Otis and made available through the sponsorship of the American Revolution Institute—returns the work to readers in a form closer to its original intent and texture. What emerges is a text that once served, and can again serve, as an education in republican memory and a manual for self-government and the preservation of individual liberty.

To read Botta today is to encounter a conception of history in which the meaning of political liberty is not taken for granted but made visible through the disciplined recollection of great events. In an age increasingly tempted to forget the moral seriousness of its own origins, Botta’s history is a reminder that the American founding was understood by its earliest interpreters not as a completed fact, but as an enduring lesson in the conditions for maintaining liberty and self-government.