There is never a dull month at Journal of the American Revolution. In February, we continued to experience impressive reader traffic and welcomed three new writers: Geoff Benton, A.K. Fielding and Jett Conner. Plus, we have been busy sorting out the details of a major announcement that will be shared in a few weeks. And then there […]
Historians have long praised newspapers for the role they played during the American Revolution, but they don’t always zero in on specific papers that were particularly important during this time. Rather, they give deserving praise to all of the press for the help they gave in winning independence. But there are particular newspapers that should […]
Does saying so make it so? Perhaps, if said convincingly and repeatedly. But sometimes it’s fair to ask: Who says so? And how do they know? It is said that George Washington ordered the first number of Thomas Paine’s The American Crisis series to be read to his ragged troops before boarding boats to cross […]
The Royal Governor’s April 21, 1775 removal from Williamsburg’s Powder Magazine of gunpowder essential to Virginia’s defense caused an immediate furor among Virginians as news spread throughout the colony. The governor’s action was in response to George III’s direction to colonial governors to take control of arms and powder throughout the colonies, direction which had […]
It’s one thing to make speeches about declaring independence, or to assemble militias and discuss battle tactics against the enemy. It’s quite another thing to pay for it all. So how do you pay for a war that no one expected to last eight years? Great Britain possessed world-wide colonies, tremendous wealth, the ability to […]
Book Review: James Madison and the Making of America by Kevin R. C. Gutzman (St. Martin’s Press, 2012) In James Madison and the Making of America Kevin R. C. Gutzman energetically debunks the mythical James Madison. Gutzman asserts that Madison was not the “Father of the Constitution” but a man who felt the Constitution was […]
On August 25, 1777 General William Howe with 17,000 men landed at Head of Elk, Maryland; he was 57 miles south of the city of Philadelphia. Over the next month, he battled the Continental Army at Brandywine Creek and the South Valley Hills before marching into Philadelphia on September 26. Because he planned to spend […]
From the outset, it was a military operation whose strategic goals were combined with a fierce quest for vengeance. On January 3, 1778, Lieutenant Colonel George Rogers Clark received a congratulatory note from Virginia’s executive council, which had approved a campaign into the far reaches of the Illinois country. Although the British post at Kaskaskia […]
In 1758, just before returning home from the French and Indian War, George Washington ran for a seat in Virginia’s House of Burgesses. Given his social standing and renown, the office was his for the taking, and on the day of the election he treated the 397 men who showed up at the poll to […]
Book Review: Blood of Tyrants: George Washington and the Forging of the Presidency by Logan Beirne (Encounter Books, 2013) On a May morning in 1754, a young George Washington commanding a handful of Virginia militia and some barely-clothed native allies fell upon some French troops in the Pennsylvania wilderness. An inexperienced Washington, keen on bending […]
New Jersey Governor William Franklin is one of the forgotten major players in the American Revolution. By the fall of 1775, he was the only royal governor in the thirteen rebellious colonies who had not fled or been chased from his post by the mounting tension between the Americans and the mother country. But William’s […]
Since 1874 a growing assumption, indeed an assumption expanding to the status of “fact,” has arisen that a document known as “The Sale of the Hessians” was a piece of propaganda written by Benjamin Franklin. A quick online search using the search terms of “Sale of the Hessians” and “Franklin” will bring up many books, […]
We sometimes use the phrase “at the right place at the right time” when describing the circumstances of someone’s good fortune. In war, the “right place” is often the place where the most important events were not happening. That sounds convoluted, but the case of George Shall will clarify the point. Shall, a native of […]
Book review: William Washington, American Light Dragoon: A Continental Cavalry Leader in the War of Independence by Daniel Murphy (Westholme Publishing, 2014). William Washington, the Revolutionary War cavalry commander, is relatively unknown. However, he played an important role in the War especially in the South, and should be recognized for his skills and accomplishments. Virtually […]
Most early portraits of George Washington represent him as serious and even dour, and more than a few contemporaries described the man as aloof. It is thus perhaps surprising to learn that he actually possessed a fine sense of humor. David Humphreys, Washington’s own secretary and official biographer, wrote c. 1788 that “grave & majestic […]
Joseph Paugenit, Jonas Obscow, Anthony Jeremiah, Simon Peney, Obadiah Wicket, and Alexander Quapish. These are not household names to the average history enthusiast. But they are among the two hundred Indians from eastern Massachusetts who fought in the Revolutionary War. Few people are aware of the contributions that these and another thousand or more Native […]
Because of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s famous poem, “Paul Revere’s Ride,” most people think that Revere was critical to the start of the Revolutionary War. In trying to dispel Longfellow’s myth of a lone hero, modern scholars have portrayed Revere as just one rider among dozens on 18-19 April 1775, and argued that his previous rides […]
Henry Livingston, or Harry as he was more commonly known, was born on November 9, 1750. He was a son of Judge Robert Livingston and his wife Margaret Beekman Livingston. Harry was the namesake of Margaret’s father Colonel Henry Beekman. As a child Henry was prone to uncontrolled fits of rage. As he matured to […]
