Month: July 2020

 Engineering and Technology Posted on

This Week on Dispatches: Jeff Dacus on the “Tower of Victory” at the Siege of Fort Watson

On this week’s Dispatches host Brady Crytzer interviews JAR contributor Jeff Dacus on how Light Horse Harry Lee and Francis Marion were able to successfully capture British Fort Watson using a siege tower designed by Maj. Hezekiah Maham. Thousands of readers like you enjoy the articles published by the Journal of the American Revolution. Dispatches is a […]

by Editors
2
People Posted on

Certain British and British American Actors in the Southern Theater of the War

This article supplements one of mine that appeared in the Journal of the American Revolutionin November 2016.[1] Based partly on The Cornwallis Papers,[2] it provides a wide-ranging set of reappraisals compartmentalised under the sub-headings below. James Paterson Paterson, as he signed his surname, had been appointed Lt. Colonel of the 63rd Regiment on June 15, […]

by Ian Saberton
Journals Posted on

“Very Cold & Nothing Remarkable”: the Journal of Dr. Edmund Hagen, Privateer and Prisoner of War, Part 2 of 2

This article continues an examination of the journal kept by Dr. Edmund Hagen of Scarborough, Maine, begun in “Dispatch’t to America’: the Journal of Dr. Edmund Hagen, Privateer and Prisoner of War.” This second article presents and examines the second half of Dr. Edmund Hagen’s journal, dealing with Hagen’s experience on board the prison ship […]

by Kadri Kallikorm-Rhodes
Journals Posted on

“Dispatch’t Him for America”: the Journal of Dr. Edmund Hagen, Privateer and Prisoner of War, Part 1 of 2

Edmund Hagen presumably never intended the publication of his daily journal of his 1776 stint as the surgeon on a successful, but ultimately ill-fated, privateer. But it is exactly the fact that his journal contemporaneously records what he at the time regarded as the important facts of the day, rather than retrospectively identifying important events […]

by Kadri Kallikorm-Rhodes
Arts & Literature Posted on

This Week on Dispatches: Greg Aaron on the American Revolution’s Influence on Superheroes

On this week’s Dispatches host Brady Crytzer interviews cybersecurity expert and former trade book editor Greg Aaron on the influence of the American Revolution on the development of some of the most iconic Superheroes and the promotion of the ideals of America in the face of intolerance and fascism. Thousands of readers like you enjoy the articles […]

by Editors
2
Constitutional Debate Posted on

Creating Order: Rufus King and the Nascent American Republic

On the afternoon of April 30, 1789, George Washington stepped onto the balcony of the freshly-renovated and renamed Federal Hall on Wall Street in Lower Manhattan and took the presidential oath of office. Then, stepping into the Senate chamber, now-President Washington gave his inaugural address. He began plaintively, admitting in his opening line that “Among […]

by Keith Muchowski
1
Battles Posted on

The Battles of Connecticut Farms and Springfield 1780

The Battles of Connecticut Farms and Springfield 1780 by Edward G. Lengel.  (Yardley, PA:  Westholme Publishing, LLC, 2020) Famed Washington historian Edward G. Lengel (editor-in-chief of the Papers of George Washington and author of General George Washington: A Military Life) reminds readers that the recognizable titles of some Revolutionary War battles were not the only ones […]

by Timothy Symington
1
People Posted on

An American Bolingbroke: John Taylor of Caroline’s Republican Opposition, 1792–1794, Part 2 of 2

Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, in the first half of the eighteenth century, and John Taylor of Caroline in the 1790s, both feared that once power had been secured by an unpatriotic faction it might employ a standing army to effect the destruction of the republic. Additionally, Taylor was among those who felt that the […]

by James A. Cornelius
Constitutional Debate Posted on

An American Bolingbroke: John Taylor of Caroline’s Republican Opposition, 1792–1794, Part 1 of 2

From 1792 to 1794, John Taylor of Caroline, a senator from Virginia, was engaged in a heated party struggle between Jeffersonian Republicans and Hamiltonian Federalists over the implementation of the latter’s new economic program. Taylor, despite being largely unknown by non-specialists today, has been called by Gordon S. Wood “the conscience of the Republican party” […]

by James A. Cornelius
Features Posted on

This Week on Dispatches: Jett Conner on Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, and the Louisiana Purchase

On this week’s Dispatches host Brady Crytzer interviews political scientist, historian, and JAR contributor Jett Conner on his recent article about Thomas Paine’s and Thomas Jefferson’s interpretations of the role of presidential powers used by Jefferson to justify the Louisiana Purchase. Thousands of readers like you enjoy the articles published by the Journal of the American […]

by Editors
4
Politics During the War (1775-1783) Posted on

L’Expédition Particulière crosses the Atlantic: The French Rally to the American Cause

Following American success at Saratoga in the autumn of 1777, French King Louis XVI signed the Treaty of Amity and Friendship, establishing open French assistance to the American cause. In May 1780 nearly 6,000 soldiers and sailors left the Port of Brest in northwest France and sailed across the Atlantic, arriving in Rhode Island in […]

by Kim Burdick
4
Engineering and Technology Posted on

The Fall of Fort Washington: The “Bunker Hill Effect”?

It was the one of the worst defeats suffered by the Americans during the War for Independence, certainly the worst over which George Washington had direct command. Historian David McCullough perhaps characterized the debacle best, writing that after experiencing “one humiliating, costly reverse after another,” during the New York campaign of 1776, “the surrender of […]

by Derrick E. Lapp