On this week’s Dispatches, host Brady Crytzer interviews historian and JAR associate editor J. L. Bell about his fascinating detective work in determining the identity of an informant who provided Dr. Joseph Warren with critical information about British plans to march on Lexington and Concord. This is “history mystery” at its best. New episodes of […]
It is common for nations to search for heroes to emulate a lofty standard for their citizens. Benjamin Franklin may be unique in that he ascended to the level of apotheosis, not initially from the acclaim of his own countrymen, but from citizens of the country abroad where he functioned as a diplomat.[1] One of […]
BOOK REVIEW: Founding Partisans: Hamilton, Madison, Jefferson, Adams and the Brawling Birth of American Politics by H. W. Brands. (New York, NY: Doubleday, 2023. $32.50 cloth) “’We shall be tossed at any rate in the tempestuous sea of liberty for years to come, and where the bark can land but in a political convulsion I […]
Did Thomas Paine actively write against the American cause after emigrating from England in late 1774 and only opportunistically pretend to support the cause? When Paine was nominated for a Congressional position in April 1777, did delegate John Witherspoon hurl those accusations against Paine?[1] As other delegates were undoubtedly well aware, Witherspoon knew Paine personally. […]
On this week’s Dispatches, host Brady Crytzer interviews JAR contributor Raphael Corletta about his recent article on the contrast between Thomas Jefferson’s “Empire of Liberty” and Esther Reed’s use of the same phrase. New episodes of Dispatchesare available for free every Saturday evening(Eastern United States Time) on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, Amazon Music, and the JAR Dispatches web […]
As 1776 was ending, a group of about 225 American prisoners was released from the British prisons in New York City to be sent to Patriot-controlled New England.[1] Most of them were enlisted soldiers from Connecticut, but there were also a few from Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, and several officers.[2] They had so far survived the […]
BOOK REVIEW: Ordinary Greatness: A Life of Elias Boudinot by Andrew Farmer (American Bible Society, 2022) Paperback $17.95, eBook $9.99. Andrew Farmer’s Ordinary Greatness: A Life of Elias Boudinot examines one of nation’s lesser-known Founding Fathers with particular emphasis given to his career as it concerns his relationship with George Whitefield, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, […]
On April 18, 1775, Dr. Joseph Warren, leader of the Patriots still inside Boston, gathered information about a possible British army march from many sources. Nineteenth-century accounts spoke of hints coming in from a groom in the governor’s stable, a boy who held horses for redcoat officers, a woman who employed a soldier’s wife as […]
On December 2, 1767, there appeared in the Pennsylvania Chronicle the first letter in a series collectively called “Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania.” The anonymous first letter came at a critical time in the growing debate between Britain and her colonies over colonial policy. By late 1767, when the first of the letters appeared, […]
BOOK REVIEW: North of America: Loyalists, Indigenous Nations, and the Borders of the Long American Revolution by Jeffers Lennox (Yale University Press, 2022) When thinking about the American Revolution and its succeeding Founding Era, two nations first come to mind: the British Empire and the fledgling new nation, the United States of America. While there […]
The description of the United States as an “Empire of Liberty” is one of the most often repeated phrases of the American founding. Long associated with Thomas Jefferson, the phrase has been used by statesmen and authors alike. But what does “Empire of Liberty” mean? What were Jefferson’s intentions with the phrase and what are […]
On this week’s Dispatches, host Brady Crytzer interviews JAR contributor Selden West on her research into a fight between Patriot whaleboat crews and the British Navy off Stamford, Connecticut in 1778. New episodes of Dispatchesare available for free every Saturday evening(Eastern United States Time) on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, Amazon Music, and the JAR Dispatches web site. Dispatchescan […]
On April 7, 1776 American ships began dropping anchors off New London, Connecticut. Esek Hopkins, commander in chief of the new Continental navy, was returning from a successful raid on the town of New Providence on Nassau island in the Bahamas. While there, the Americans had seized eighty-eight desperately needed cannon and fifteen mortars, thousands […]
BOOK REVIEW: The War of American Independence, 1763-1783: Falling Dominoes by Stanley D. M. Carpenter, Kevin J. Delamer, James R. McIntyre and Andrew T. Zwilling (New York, NY: Routledge, 2023) The War of American Independence, 1763-1783: Falling Dominoes is the latest addition to Routledge’s War and History series, and it is being marketed primarily as […]
The Valley Forge winter of 1777-78 is an integral part of America’s national narrative.[1] For many citizens, the name “Valley Forge” relates both a physical and intellectual landscape, specific spatial geography in Pennsylvania and a certain emotional acreage representative of the enduring suffering many Americans embraced during the revolution. At the end of that challenging […]
Very early on a hot summer’s day in 1778, Moses Mather, Jr., son and namesake of the Patriot minister of Middlesex Parish (today’s Darien), Connecticut, was seventeen years old and sitting in a whaleboat just offshore.[1] Only two years before, whaleboats rarely had been seen in western Long Island Sound. But as enemies on both […]
BOOK REVIEW: A Maritime History of the American Revolutionary War: An Atlantic-Wide Conflict Over Independence and Empire by Theodore Corbett (Pen and Sword Maritime, 2023) Theodore Corbett is scholar and university professor who has written a number of local area Revolutionary War histories: on the Hudson River Valley and Saratoga; New Castle, Delaware; Chestertown, Maryland; […]
The Articles of Confederation provided inadequate funding and guidance for the thirteen colonies during the American Revolution. After six years of fighting, the war miraculously ended with victory in 1783. The Articles of Confederation did not give the new Congress of the Confederation adequate power to govern the newly created United States of America. Financial […]
On this week’s Dispatches, host Brady Crytzer interviews author and JAR contributor Gerald Krieger on his research into how the British miscalculated their support among Loyalists in the South. New episodes of Dispatchesare available for free every Saturday evening(Eastern United States Time) on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, Amazon Music, and the JAR Dispatches web site. Dispatchescan now be […]
The last surviving major general of the American Revolution was French aristocrat Marie Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert Du Motier, the marquis de Lafayette. Invited by President James Monroe to help usher in America’s fiftieth anniversary, Lafayette came, accompanied by his son, Georges Washington de Lafayette, and Secretary Auguste Levasseur. In 1824 and 1825, these […]
BOOK REVIEW: Novels, Needleworks, and Empire: Material Entanglements in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World by Chloe Wigston Smith (Yale University Press) Novels, Needleworks, and Empire: Material Entanglements in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World by Chloe Wigston Smith details how processes and objects of the domestic life were inherently intertwined with colonialism. Smith argues that while white women […]
The American Revolution provides heroes like almost no other event in American history. In a society where most of us live in comfort, with good medical care and remedies for what ails us, we recognize the sacrifices the people of the eighteenth century made for the cause of American liberty and, eventually, to build a […]
On this week’s Dispatches, host Brady Crytzer interviews author and JAR contributor Gene Procknow on Henry Clinton’s Plan to end the war. New episodes of Dispatchesare available for free every Saturday evening(Eastern United States Time) on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, Amazon Music, and the JAR Dispatches web site. Dispatchescan now be easily accessed on the JAR main menu. […]
The Royal Governor of the Colony of North Carolina, Josiah Martin, was young and dedicated to the Crown. His popularity was waning as he urged members of the Assembly on April 4, 1774, to resist the monster of sedition that was raising its ugly head in the colonies. He knew that his appeals fell on […]
Toasts are a familiar concept, but most people probably do not consider toasts to carry political weight or any real social significance beyond the ritual of bonding and celebration. However, as Timonthy Symington demonstrates in Huzza!: Toasting a New nation, 1760-1815, toasts occupied a place of special significance bolstering public support and creating political ideals […]
The Livingston mansion was a large frame house with a colonnaded front porch and four marble chimneys.[1] The chimneys were Italian imports and illustrated the worldliness and influence of the house’s prosperous merchant owner, Philip Livingston. Livingston, though, was absent and the house was instead serving as the military headquarters for George Washington’s Continental Army […]
Welcome to the New JAR Site! After over ten years without a change, we’ve refreshed our web site. We still have the same great articles, podcast, and content that you’ve come to rely on as a trusted source for information about the American Revolution and Founding Era, but with a new look that should be easier […]
BOOK REVIEW: Seized with the Temper of The Times: Identity and Rebellion in Pre-Revolutionary America by Abby Chandler (Westholme, 2023) In the past fifteen years or so, there has been, happily, an explosion of books published on battles and other military aspects of the American Revolutionary War. In the same time frame, far fewer books […]
The court martial of Maj. Gen. Charles Lee, who had been George Washington’s second in command during the Monmouth campaign, centered on three charges against him for his conduct during the Battle of Monmouth, fought near Freehold, New Jersey, on June 28, 1778. Lee was found guilty by the court on all three charges. The […]
The General Sir Henry Clinton papers at the William C. Clements Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan, contain a curious document, “A proposal to Subdue the Rebellion and a Sketch of the Necessary Rout for that purpose.” The British military plan envisioned a summer campaign attacking north from New York City to capture the Hudson River […]
BOOK REVIEW: King Hancock: The Radical Influence of a Moderate Founding Father by Brooke Barbier (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2023) To my mind, there are three main currents of historiography of the American Revolution in the present day. The first is the de-deification of the Founding Fathers, seen in both published works and in the […]
On October 19, 1777, two days after the Articles of Convention brought his “disaster at Saratoga” to a close, British Lt. Gen. John Burgoyne arrived in Albany, New York, a defeated man. There, Burgoyne resided in the home of Maj. Gen. Philip Schuyler until October 27, 1777.[1] Most accounts of his stay focus on the hospitality […]
On this week’s Dispatches, host Brady Crytzer interviews historian and JAR contributor Jude Pfisteron John Marshall’s magisterial biography of George Washington. New episodes of Dispatchesare available for free every Saturday evening(Eastern United States Time) on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, Amazon Music, and the JAR Dispatches web site. Dispatchescan now be easily accessed on the JAR main menu. Thousands of readers […]
On November 16, 1775, Robert Dixon lay dying not far from Quebec. Among the first American troops commissioned by the Continental Congress, he was a sergeant in Matthew Smith’s Company of Thompson’s Rifle Battalion. The previous July, he had walked with his company from the backcountry of Pennsylvania all the way to Boston, a distance […]
BOOK REVIEW: A Republic of Scoundrels: The Schemers, Intriguers, and Adventurers Who Created a New American Nation edited by David Head and Timothy C. Hemmis (New York, NY: Pegasus Books, 2023) Many believe that books written with rigorous academic care are not enjoyable and appropriate only for wonkish readers. Editors and essayists David Head and Timothy C. […]
The Pines Bridge Monument, unveiled on November 17, 2018 in Yorktown Heights, New York, is the first Revolutionary War memorial to depict a white American, an African American, and a Native American uniting with each other against enemy forces.[1] In an era when existing monuments, such as that of the Albany icon General Philip Schuyler, […]
John Marshall’s life (1755-1835) has been the subject of many authors over the nearly 190 years since his death. Albert Beveridge, Charles Hobson, and Leonard Baker immediately come to mind. There are others, of course; and there are those works which look at the life of Marshall’s wife, Mary (Polly). Their home of nearly fifty […]
The traditional story of Valley Forge tells of an encampment where a weakened and stripped-down army of 11,000 men endured the hardships of a winter cantonment rife with depravations. Overcoming crippling deficiencies and benefitting from superb training by the first Inspector General of the United States, Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, the army got healthy and […]
The senate chamber of the Maryland State House was more crowded than usual. It was December 23, 1783. Congress had recently relocated to Annapolis, and now George Washington was in town to fulfill a promise he made eight years earlier. “I went with several others to see Gen. Washington resign his Commission,” Annapolis socialite Mary […]
