Month: March 2025

 Autobiography and Biography Posted on

Elijah Clark and the Revolutionary American Frontier

Although a genuine folk hero, little has been published about Elijah Clark (often spelled Clarke) beyond well-intended historical fiction.[1] Like his contemporaries Daniel Boone and George Rogers Clark, he should be remembered as an important frontier leader. Clark’s first biographer, Absalom Harris Chappell, wrote in 1874 that he would never have been known if he […]

by Robert Scott Davis
Reviews Posted on

An American Triumph

BOOK REVIEW: An American Triumph: America’s Founding Era Through the Lives of Ben Franklin, George Washington, and John Adams by Tom Hand (Americana Corner Press, 2023) $35.00 Hardcover. Tom Hand’s An American Triumph examines the lives of Benjamin Franklin, George Washington and John Adams. Hand, a West Point graduate, created the website “Americana Corner” in […]

by Kelsey DeFord
1
Critical Thinking Posted on

The Federalist Papers

Aside from the commercially inspired Mount Vernon Compact of 1785, the first public acknowledgement of the enormous inability of Congress to govern the peace in the new United States was the calling of the Annapolis Convention for September 1786. William Grayson, writing to James Madison that May, sounded upon the grievances of an ineffective Congress, […]

by Jude M. Pfister
Reviews Posted on

The Scientist Turned Spy

BOOK REVIEW: The Scientist Turned Spy: Andre Michaux, Thomas Jefferson, and the Conspiracy of 1793 by Patrick Spero (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2024) $34.95 Hardcover Dreary as they may have been, the COVID lockdowns had a few positive consequences; they did give some historians, among them Patrick Spero, the Chief Executive Officer of the […]

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

George Washington and Thomas Paine: Friendship in a Revolutionary Age

George Washington was famously taciturn, often a man of few words in public gatherings. And though his published works are sparse in comparison to many of his fellow founders, he nevertheless left a voluminous written record of correspondence and diary entries that is still being parsed today.[1] It was while commanding the Continental Army that […]

by Jett Conner
Interviews Posted on

On This Week’s Dispatches: Andrew Lawler on Lord Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment

On this week’s Dispatches, host Brady Crytzer interviews author and JAR contributor Andrew Lawler about Virginia Royal Governor John Murray, Lord Dunmore’s decision to begin arming enslaved men in service to the Crown. Murray’s actions sent shockwaves across the colony. New episodes of Dispatches are available for free every Sunday evening  (Eastern United States Time), […]

by Editors