BOOK REVIEW: John Hancock: First to Sign, First to Invest in America’s Independence by Willard Sterne Randall (Dutton, 2025). Trends of historical research over the past few decades have steadily moved away from the “Great Man” study of the past that produced a slew of works on singular characters of important periods in favor of […]
On August 14, 1765, the town of Boston was in turmoil. At the entrance to the city, two large effigies were hanging from a great tree. The first effigy was that of John Stuart, the Earl of Bute, whilst the second was that of Andrew Oliver, a local stamp collector. Their two likenesses had been […]
On this week’s Dispatches, host Brady Crytzer interviews historian JAR Contributor Elizabeth Reese about the life of George Washington’s granddaughter, Eleanor “Nelly” Parke Custis, whose life began to spiral after the President’s passing. New episodes of Dispatches are available for free every Sunday evening (Eastern United States Time), first on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, Amazon […]
“He is one of those who fought in the Revolutionary War for that Independence which the people of this Country now enjoy. That whilst his country had need of his services . . . he did not remain at home ‘idle in his cabin,’ but went wherever his country call[ed], & his General dared to […]
“I am drove almost to death for money. We are rich poor cursed rascals. By God, alter our measures or we shall be a hiss, a proverb, and a bye word, and derision upon earth.” Ethan Allen writing to Ira Allen, August 18, 1786.[1] How could two renowned, high-ranking men from Vermont’s Revolutionary period, the […]
The fighting that raged over miles of Massachusetts countryside on April 19, 1775 finally subsided with the approach of evening. Thousands of Massachusetts militia had converged upon retreating British troops as they made their way back from Concord that fateful spring day and the casualties suffered by the redcoats were shocking. Two hundred and seventy-two […]
BOOK REVIEW: Shots Heard Round the World: American, Britain, and Europe in the Revolutionary War by John Ferling. (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2025) $40.00 Hardcover. John Ferling gives readers another history of the American Revolution with his 2025 work, Shots Heard Round the World: America, Britain, and Europe in the Revolutionary War. Despite that label in this […]
Among the foreign-born leaders who played crucial roles in the American Revolution, Hungarian-born Colonel Commandant Michael Kovats de Fabriczy stands out for his significant, yet often overlooked, contributions to the Continental Army.[1] Kovats played a key role in the establishment and development of the cavalry, overseeing the recruitment, training, and organization of regular cavalry units. […]
On this week’s Dispatches, host Brady Crytzer interviews historian and distinguished professor Franklin D. Rausch on an early, pivotal battle between Patiots (Whigs) and Loyalists in South Carolina, with the Loyalists trying to dislodge the Whigs from their strong point at Savages’ Old Fields. The battle was instrumental in drawing up the lines of what […]
The life of Eleanor “Nelly” Parke Custis Lewis was one of privilege and loss. After the premature death of her father, John “Jacky” Parke Custis, in 1781, Nelly and her younger brother, George Washington “Wash” Custis, were sent to Mount Vernon to live with their paternal grandmother, Martha, and her husband George Washington. Under the […]
Nathanael Greene famously wrote of his experience during the Southern Campaign that “The whole Country is in Danger of being laid Waste by the Whigs and Tories who pursue each other with as much relentless Fury as Beasts of Prey.” Historian John Pancake comments that “This observation was made by Nathanael Greene, a man already […]
BOOK REVIEW: The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780 by Rick Atkinson (Crown, 2025) $42.00 Hardcover The revolt that led to the loss of its thirteen Atlantic coast colonies was one of the slowest moving train wrecks in the storied history of the British Empire. Beginning as early […]
Alarming news of violence on the Upper Ohio flooded Pittsburgh in the late summer of 1777. On August 2, Joseph Ogle reported from Wheeling that a Native war party had wounded two men. James Booth, further south in Monongalia County, wrote that a mother and child had been killed and scalped and another captured. Col. […]
On this week’s Dispatches, host Brady Crytzer interviews Molly Fortune, chief executive officer of South Carolina’s 250th anniversary initiatives, including the publication of the first volume of the Francis Marion Papers. New episodes of Dispatches are available for free every Sunday evening (Eastern United States Time), first on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, Amazon Music, and […]
Ebenezer Lathrop’s company of militia which marched from Norwich, Connecticut, to Stillwater, New York, in the autumn of 1777 makes an excellent case study to understand Connecticut’s militia forces in the middle of the American War of Independence. When Connecticut raised companies that Fall to serve with Gen. Horatio Gates’s army, most were formed by […]
If you’ve travelled on US Interstate 90 in New York between Albany and Rome, New York, you may have noticed the words FORT PLAIN emblazoned on a hillside rising up on one side of the highway. It would be easy to assume that this just announces the town of Fort Plain, but for the Revolutionary […]
This month we asked our contributors to tell us about an artifact from the 1765-1805 era known to have existed well into the nineteenth century, that has since been stolen or gone missing. J.L. Bell In the mid-1800s James Ward Hall of Cavendish, Vermont, told Henry B. Atherton about a “military cap with its three […]
Agrippa Hull was a free black man who enlisted in the Continental Army from Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and served for six and a half years until the end of hostilities. In early 2024 the Museum & Archives of the Stockbridge Library Association acquired, through private sale, Agrippa Hull’s certificate of discharge from the Continental Army, dated […]
BOOK REVIEW: From Trenton to Yorktown: Turning Points of the American Revolution by John R. Maass (Oxford, UK: Osprey Publishing, 2025) $30.00 hardcover. John R. Maass produced a very readable and enjoyable narrative with the publication of his recent text. In his introduction the author points out that warfare remains an important component of human […]
Historians generally agree on who were America’s principal Founders, but the roll call invariably omits the name of one individual without whose steadfast assistance the United States would have been unlikely to have gained independence. Comte Charles Gravier de Vergennes, France’s foreign minister throughout the long, desperate war, was a crucial player in America’s victory […]
On this week’s Dispatches, host Brady Crytzer interviews author and JAR contributor Michael Cecere about how each colony prepared its militia as war with Great Britain became more of a possibility in 1774 and 1775. New episodes of Dispatches are available for free every Sunday evening (Eastern United States Time), first on iTunes, Stitcher, Google […]
Until 1765, there were no medical schools in the American colonies. In the words of one historian, a man aspiring to the medical profession was obliged to acquire his training as an apprentice to an older doctor. Beginning usually at fifteen years of age, he took care of the physician’s office and his horse, and […]
BOOK REVIEW: The Ride: Paul Revere and the Night that Saved America by Kostya Kennedy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2025) The story of Paul Revere’s ride through the Massachusetts countryside on the night of April 18-19, 1775, to warn that British troops were on the march, is so familiar that people might believe there […]
The Revolutionary War in the Ohio and Upper Mississippi River Valleys is generally looked upon as a side show to the main conflict along the Atlantic Seaboard. However, the impact of the forces in the Old Northwest Territory was much greater than their small size could have anticipated. Historian Pauline Peyton posited that had the […]
In 1776, the Declaration of Independence charted a new autonomous path for thirteen of Britain’s North American colonies. One of the document’s many allegations was that British authorities had “excited domestic insurrections amongst us.”[1] While its context largely pointed towards Native Americans, another inspiration for this grievance may have been the embodying of Loyalist regiments […]
BOOK REVIEW: Threshold to Valley Forge: The Six Days of the Gulph Mills Encampment by Sheilah D. Vance (Havertown, PA: Brookline Books, 2025) $24.95 Paperback. As the crow flies, the region west of Matson’s Ford and known as “The Gulph” loomed a mere dozen miles northwest of Philadelphia. The nearly weeklong encampment of George Washington […]
As part of the British empire, none of the thirteen American colonies maintained a standing army of the sort Great Britain and the other European powers had. American colonists looked to their own militia and when necessary, the British army and navy, for their defense. The French and Indian War of the 1750s and 1760s, […]
On this week’s Dispatches, host Brady Crytzer interviews author and JAR contributor Jude Pfister. The Federalist Papers stand amongst the most important documents from the Revolutionary era, and they are being reevaluated for a new era. New episodes of Dispatches are available for free every Sunday evening (Eastern United States Time), first on iTunes, Stitcher, […]
In New York City, at nine o’clock in the morning on Thursday, April 30, 1789, Americans of diverse Christian denominations filed into their churches in and around Broad Street. Once settled, their respective clergymen led them in prayer, asking for “the blessing of Heaven upon the new government.” These well-wishers also pleaded for divine “protection […]
BOOK REVIEW: The Traitor’s Homecoming: Benedict Arnold’s Raid on New London, Connecticut, September 4-13, 1781 by Matthew E. Reardon. (El Dorado Hills, CA: Savas Beatie, 2024.) Hardcover $35.95 Matthew E. Reardon gives scholarship on the traitor Benedict Arnold a new addition with his 2024 work, The Traitor’s Homecoming: Benedict Arnold’s Raid on New London, Connecticut, […]
Following the Boston Tea Party, Parliament passed three Acts that would become known as the Coercive Acts. The first was the Boston Port Bill; it ordered the port of Boston to be shut down until all of the damages incurred at “the Party” were paid for in full. This bill was introduced in the House […]
The American Revolution ended many lives and cut short many promising futures. A few of the fallen became celebrated martyrs in the cause of liberty, but most died in obscurity and are unremembered today. Thomas Williams, Jr. of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, was one who died, after considerable military service, less than a week after the Declaration […]
BOOK REVIEW: Robert Rogers, Ranger: The Rise and Fall of an American Icon by Martin Klotz. (Yardley, PA: Westholme Publishing, 2024). $32.50 hardcover. In 1940, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer movies released “Northwest Passage,” a rather loose adaptation of Kenneth Roberts’ book by the same name.[1] In it, well-liked and respected hero-figure Robert Rogers leads a skilled and disciplined […]
Following the ratification of the Franco-American Alliance on February 6, 1778, France informed Great Britain that it had joined forces with America in its war with England. As an integral part of this arrangement, France and the United States had agreed that neither would form a treaty with Britain without the approval of the other. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
There is a coatee from the collection of the Bayville Historical Museum that is presently stored within the Oyster Bay Historical Society Archive that appears to be a genuine uniform from the American Revolution. It is speculated to have belonged to a soldier from the Loyalist militia of Queens County, New York and possibly that […]
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 […]
