February felt like National New JAR Contributor Month with four new writers: Ennis Duling, Anthony J. Minna, Thomas Thorleifur Sobol and Tyler Rudd Putman. Welcome aboard! That makes seven new JAR authors in the first two months of 2016 and 120 total JAR contributors since we launched! Together we have now published more than 725 articles with many more fascinating pieces on […]
We are pleased to introduce our newest collectible hardback, which is now available for pre-order via Amazon and will deliver in April. The Journal of the American Revolution, Annual Volume 2016, presents the journal’s best historical research and writing over the past calendar year. Articles are carefully selected by the editorial board and authors are given […]
Book review: George Washington’s Journey: The President Forges a New Nation by T. H. Breen (Simon & Schuster, 2016). [BUY NOW ON AMAZON] George Washington’s standing as the Revolutionary Era’s “indispensable man” is virtually unchallenged. Veteran historian T.H. Breen’s new study of Washington’s tours during his first term of office can only add to that assessment. […]
In July 1776, Brig. Gen. Benedict Arnold brought charges against Col. Moses Hazen for disobeying orders and neglecting merchandise seized in Montréal. Hazen was a Massachusetts-born Québec landowner and merchant who commanded a small regiment of Canadians in the Continental army. In April when Arnold took command in Montréal, he called Hazen “a sensible judicious […]
No country venerates its “Founding Fathers” like the United States. Academics, legislators, judges, and ordinary citizens all frequently seek to validate their opinions and policy prescriptions by identifying them with the statesmen who led America to nationhood. It is not surprising, therefore, that debates about the role of religion in the United States are infused […]
An internet search for Conrad Heyer will reveal that he was a Revolutionary War soldier who crossed the Delaware with George Washington. In fact, you’ll find a variation of this sentence repeated on page after page almost word for word: “He served in the Continental Army under George Washington during the Revolutionary War, crossing the […]
Taxation without representation has been the traditionally accepted cause of the American Revolution. Such an understanding of the Revolution, while valid, does not give credit to its complexity. An often-neglected aspect of Virginia’s American Revolution experience is the importance of the frontier. Soil exhaustion, a recurrent problem of Virginia’s tobacco economy, turned planters into land […]
Book review: Washington’s Immortals: The Untold Story of an Elite Regiment Who Changed the Course of the Revolution by Patrick K. O’Donnell (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2016). [BUY NOW ON AMAZON] The author uses the words of the actual participants to craft a powerful narrative of the American Revolution focusing on the contributions and sacrifices of […]
“The most unhappy man in the world,” wrote the Commissary General of Purchases at Valley Forge about Gen. George Washington.[1] On every portrait we examine, on every image we see, the commander in chief does appear burdened and preoccupied. Occasionally, though, hidden among the millions of words written by, and about, General Washington, we catch […]
When Gen. Henry Clinton was preparing the British army to leave Philadelphia, he received instructions from Lord George Germain, the British Secretary at War, to send 5,800 troops to the West Indies. When he learned that the navy was in no position to send ships to protect the transports, Clinton refused to dispatch the troops. […]
Book Review: First Entrepreneur: How George Washington Built His — and the Nation’s — Prosperity by Edward G. Lengel (Da Capo Press, 2016). [BUY NOW ON AMAZON] When one thinks of George Washington, perhaps the first image is that of the military commander of the Revolutionary War. Next might be Washington as president. Few are likely to […]
In an army where men died as a matter of course, there was nonetheless something peculiarly unsettling about the business scheduled for the morning of September 23, 1776. The grim verdict of a court-martial four days before had, at least in the opinion of Connecticut’s Joseph Plumb Martin, left the troops “greatly exasperated.”[1] For his […]
In the spring of 1775, the fur trading post at the junction of Lakes Michigan and Huron looked much as it had for years. Fort Michilimackinac, significantly larger than when the French founded the site in 1715, comprised a tall stockade wall surrounding streets of privately owned row houses, a church, a soldiers’ barracks, officers’ […]
On July 4, 1776, the authors of American independence declared to the world “that all men are created equal, [and] that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” However, one of the Declaration’s grievances against the English Crown was that it employed “the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose […]
On April 24, 1775, Samuel Adams and John Hancock arrived in Worcester, Massachusetts, forty miles west of Boston. They hoped to find three more men – John Adams, Thomas Cushing and Robert Treat Paine – who were the other three delegates from the colony to the upcoming second Continental Congress, but they had not been […]
The Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island is the only Jewish house of worship that survives from the American colonial period. Built at the threshold of America’s Revolutionary period, it survived the war and the damaging occupation of Newport by British troops. After the war, the congregation returned and the synagogue formed the focal point […]
