On this week’s Dispatches, host Brady Crytzer presents a talk by historian and author Glenn F. Williams that he recorded on Saturday, November 2nd, 2024, at the Braddock’s Road Preservation Association Annual Seminar in Ligonier, Pennsylvania. Williams discusses Dunmore’s War; he is introduced in this recording by BRPA Vice President David Preston. New episodes of […]
Warfare during the American Revolution could be brutal; this brutality took on entirely new dimensions in the frontier, and could be devastating, unrelenting, and all-pervading. Threats came in many forms—isolation, starvation, exposure; labor took countless forms as well, demanding never-ending toil and dogged perseverance. Like many whose charge was to defend America’s back door, the […]
In 1777, the third year of the American War for Independence, little had gone in the favor of the Patriots especially in the borderlands. They controlled Fort Pitt and several other outposts, but they were far from the main fighting; the region was considered a backwater theater. British governor of Detroit Henry Hamilton issued a […]
The settlers who chose to make their homes in the upper Ohio in the mid to late eighteenth century faced a wide variety of challenges to survive in this backcountry, ranging from the distance to centers of trade and population to the difficulty in practicing agriculture in old-growth forests. That this frontier, the area surrounding […]
When the American Revolution began, the Virginia Colony faced not one military-territorial contest, but four. Its ousted Royal governor, Lord Dunmore, was in the Chesapeake actively plotting a forcible return to power. A longstanding dispute with Pennsylvania over the headwaters of the Ohio had turned violent. A formal peace with the Shawnee on the northwest […]
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 […]
On this week’s Dispatches host Brady Crytzer interviews JAR contributor and writer Eric Sterner on the Siege of Fort Henry on the Virginia frontier in 1782. The siege is notable for the bravery of Elizabeth “Betty” Zane, who risked her life to bring much needed gunpowder back to the fort. Thousands of readers like you enjoy the […]
On this week’s Dispatches host Brady Crytzer interviews military veteran and history professor Patrick H. Hannum on Lord Dunmore’s proclamation to emancipate slaves who joined the British military. Thousands of readers like you enjoy the articles published by the Journal of the American Revolution. Dispatches is a free podcast that puts a voice to the writing in […]
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, […]
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 […]
