Eric Sterner is a national security and aerospace consultant in the Washington, DC area. He held senior staff positions for the Committees on Armed Services and Science in the House of Representatives and served in the Department of Defense and as NASA’s Associate Deputy Administrator for Policy and Planning. He earned a Bachelor’s at American University and two Master’s Degrees from George Washington University. He has written for a variety of publications, ranging from academic journals to the trade and popular media. His idea of a good time is traipsing through historical sites with his family.
As word of the outbreak of war at Lexington and Concord spread among the British colonies in North America, they accelerated efforts to build military forces, often as ad hoc militia companies organized at the county level that would then later be amalgamated into regiments and brigades. The companies might be named for the men […]
On August 17, 1775 Capt. James Wood returned to his home in Winchester, Virginia from a month-long diplomatic mission to the Native American nations west of the Appalachian Mountains and north of the Ohio River.[1] Wood’s mission was vital. In one of its last official acts, the Virginia House of Burgesses appointed George Washington, Thomas […]
BOOK REVIEW: The First Fleets: Colonial Navies of the British Atlantic World, 1630-1775 by Benjamin C. Schaffer (University of Alabama Press, 2025) $34.95, paperback The United States Navy honors October 13, 1775 as its birthday in keeping with a resolution passed by the Second Continental Congress to acquire two vessels “for a cruize eastward, for […]
The American Revolution west of the Appalachians produced a number of stories, which in their constant retelling evolved into legends. They created a unique frontier mythology. Just as ancient Greece had Achilles and Odysseus, America west of the Appalachians had Daniel Boone and Simon Kenton. An American officer and frontier scout, Samuel Brady, became one […]
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 […]
On April 18, 1776 Captain Tyringham Howe of His Majesty’s Ship Glasgow arrived in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Two weeks prior, the twenty-gun sloop had engaged a task force from the Continental Navy and given better than she received. Vice Admiral Molyneux Shuldham, who briefly commanded Royal Navy in American waters, expected Glasgow to be carrying dispatches from […]
Like a rock dropped into a smooth pond, the American Revolution spread ripples across the European world. French and Spanish entry into the war amplified those ripples to reach the distant shores of the Baltic and White Seas. In 1780, Russia reacted and threatened to upend the entire strategic balance in Europe, which would have […]
John Rutledge had been prominent in South Carolina politics virtually since establishing his Charleston law practice in 1761. He served in the General Assembly, tousled with the governor over colonial governance, represented the colony in the Stamp Act Congress, then again in the First and Second Continental Congresses. A moderate, he was instrumental in drafting […]
John Rutledge was born into Charleston’s elite in 1739 and by April 1775 had established himself as a defender of English rights in the colonies. A British-educated lawyer, he served in South Carolina’s General Assembly and represented the colony in the Stamp Act Congress, the First Continental Congress, and the early days of the Second […]
John Rutledge is one of those members of the founding generation who often get overlooked. Yet, for every Jefferson, Adams, or Washington, there were many like Rutledge who focused on the nitty gritty work of building a new country. Rutledge was born in 1739 to an Irish father and his fifteen-year-old bride. The oldest in […]
During the Revolutionary War, Pittsburgh was a place of constant political and economic intrigue, double-dealing, subversion, back-stabbing, disloyalty, and treachery. One of the earliest and most jaw-droppingly ambitious plans to secure the city for the British came from the mind of Dr. John Connolly.[1] Word of his “plot” spread widely across the colonies in 1775 […]
In 1774, as tensions between colonials and Native Americans living along the upper Ohio River grew, settlers either fled east of the mountains or forted up. During the summer, Maj. Angus McDonald of the Virginia militia marched over the Appalachians to Wheeling on the Ohio River and joined the locals like Ebenezer Zane, the town’s founder, […]
During the American Revolution, British-allied Native Americans raided American homesteads and settlements all along the Ohio Valley. As the war progressed, the increased frequency and ever-widening circle of Indian raids forced the Continental Congress and Army to respond. In 1778, a Congressional committee studied the matter and concluded that a defensive war “would not only […]
In June 1777, Henry Hamilton, the British lieutenant governor for Quebec and Superintendent for Indian Affairs at Detroit, held a council at Detroit with all who would attend. His goal was simple: mobilize the western Indian nations to attack Americans all along the Ohio frontier, just as the Six Nations were doing along the northern […]
Book Review: Gibraltar: The Greatest Siege in British History by Roy Adkins and Lesley Adkins, (Viking, 2017). BUY THIS BOOK FROM AMAZON It is natural to think of the American Revolution in terms of events on the Atlantic coast of North America. But the American Revolution was a truly global war. King George III and […]
Book Review: The Indian World of George Washington by Colin G. Calloway (Oxford University Press, 2018) BUY THIS BOOK FROM AMAZON In writing The Indian World of George Washington Colin Calloway set off to rectify a shortcoming in American history. According to him, “American history has largely forgotten what Washington knew. Narratives of national expansion and Indian […]
For most of the American Revolution, a community of Lenape/Delaware, Munsey, Mahican, and Mingo Indians who had adopted the Christian faith lived along the Tuscarawas River in present-day Ohio with their missionaries from the Moravian Church.[1] The most famous of these were David Zeisberger (1721-1808) and John Heckewelder (1743-1823), who documented their experiences and studies […]
In 1782, six months after Cornwallis’ surrender at Yorktown, Patriot militiamen committed one of the most heinous war crimes of the Revolutionary War. On March 8, between 100 and 200 militia and frontiersmen from western Pennsylvania slaughtered nearly 100 peaceful Indians at the small village of Gnadenhutten, on the Tuscarawas River in present day Ohio.[1] […]
Every summer, millions of tourists flock to the beaches and resorts on the Delaware-Maryland-Virginia (Delmarva) peninsula sandwiched between the Chesapeake Bay and Atlantic Ocean. Those headed for Bethany Beach, Fenwick Island, or the state parks that line the Atlantic shores of Delaware may well pass by Prince George’s Chapel in Dagsboro. Authorized in 1755 by […]
Book review: Dunmore’s War: The Last Conflict of America’s Colonial Era by Glenn Williams (Westholme, 2017) [BUY NOW ON AMAZON] In 1763, King George III issued a proclamation essentially declaring the regions west of the Allegheny off limits to settlement by whites. As it took responsibility for territories once claimed by France, Britain hoped to […]
Last month, Americans observed the peaceful transition of power from one president to another, from one political party to another. Some will point to a tradition that begins with George Washington, who voluntarily stepped down as the first president under the new U.S. Constitution when his second term ended. In fact, the new nation was […]
Book review: Manufacturing Independence: Industrial Innovation in the American Revolution by Robert F. Smith (Westholme Publishing, August 2016) [BUY NOW ON AMAZON] In his 1961 Farewell Address, President Eisenhower famously warned his fellow citizens to “guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex.” While his warning endured, he […]
The study of ancient Greece and Rome was a significant part of upper class education in Colonial and Revolutionary America. The founders were familiar with spread of Greek democracy, the fall of the Roman Republic, concepts of citizenship, and the rise of tyrants and dictators. They drew cautionary lessons, particularly about the vulnerabilities of democracies […]
John Paul Jones tends to overshadow the study of the American Revolution at sea. While his accolades are well deserved, Jones earned many of them with John Peck Rathbun at his side. An American-born merchant captain who joined the Continental Navy at its beginning, Rathbun’s exploits are as daring as Jones’s, but less well known. […]
Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 proclamation established Thanksgiving as the national holiday we celebrate today, making him the father of modern Thanksgiving.[1] The Revolutionary generation, however, created the first national Thanksgiving holidays 157 years after the Pilgrims and 85 years before Lincoln’s historic proclamation. In this season of football games and parades ending with Santa Claus, it […]