Hell’s Half-Acre: The Fall of Loyalist Crean Brush
byOn October 18, 1777, New York provincial assemblyman, and tory, Crean Brush, penned his final will and testament from prison in Boston. After nineteen…
On October 18, 1777, New York provincial assemblyman, and tory, Crean Brush, penned his final will and testament from prison in Boston. After nineteen…
Colonel Samuel Bryan is thought to be the highest-ranking Loyalist officer to remain in the United States after the Revolutionary War. Despite being a…
On or about November 19, 1781, a Loyalist officer named William Cunningham and his regiment of approximately three hundred men rode toward Hayes Station,…
At dawn, on Sunday, May 19, 1782, “a large new schooner” moved steadily eastward across Long Island Sound. At the helm was Capt. James…
Resisting Independence: Popular Loyalism in the Revolutionary British Atlantic by Brad A. Jones (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2021) In Resisting Independence: Popular Loyalism in the…
The two forces of paternalism and slavery shaped the lives of Loyalist slaveowners in the postwar British Empire. Historians rarely connect these forces in…
On this week’s Dispatches, host Brady Crytzer interviews researcher, writer, and JAR contributor Todd Braisted on loyalist Benjamin Thompson—later Count Mumford—and the provincial mounted regiment that…
On this week’s Dispatches, host Brady Crytzer interviews writer, historian, and twenty-five year US Army veteran Mark Sullivan on his recent JAR article about…
John Corlis (sometimes spelled Corlies) was a Quaker land owner who resided in Shrewsbury Township, Monmouth County, New Jersey. He along with his mother…
During the American Revolution it could be difficult to determine who was supporting the American cause and who remained loyal to Great Britain. Many…
On this week’s Dispatches host Brady Crytzer interviews AP History teacher and JAR contributor Kevin A. Conn on the remarkable career of New Jersey Loyalist…
Introduction This article supplements one relating to royal militia commanders in the South Carolina Backcountry that appeared in the Journal of the American Revolution…
On this week’s Dispatches host Brady Crytzer interviews JAR contributor Eric Wiser tells the fascinating story of notorious Loyalist partisan and British spy, Cornelius Hatfield,…
In September 1780, writing from Hillsborough, North Carolina, just one month after the disastrous defeat at Camden, Maj. Gen. Horatio Gates penned a disconcerted…
The first article of this series discussed the increasing chorus of American Patriots in New England raising their voices against the African slave trade….
Beyond Florida’s state boundaries the history of New Smyrna is seldom mentioned.[1] Well known to the locals of New Smyrna Beach, the region’s settlement by…
It may have been Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s patriotic paean that belatedly canonized a heroic horseman as a key figure of the American Revolution, but…
On this week’s Dispatches host Brady Crytzer interviews history teacher and JAR contributor Matthew Reardon on the Loyalist raid up the Connecticut River in 1782 when…
1774: The Long Year of Revolution by Mary Beth Norton (Knopf, 2020) Although previous works have tried to draw attention to “The Missing 16…
Leaving Colonel Francis Lord Rawdon to command in the field from Georgetown to Augusta, Lt. Gen. Charles Earl Cornwallis, the British General Officer Commanding…
What most Americans know about the Revolutionary War they learned when they were in elementary or middle school. The curricular timing is fortunate in…
East Florida only had one newspaper in the colony’s entire history. The newspaper went live during the final year of the American War for…
Queens County of Long Island, New York, had an overwhelming Loyalist population throughout the Revolutionary War period. After the war many Loyalists remained on…
For a brief seven weeks, the Pennsylvania frontier village of Easton became the second largest community within the state. With an estimated 25,000 inhabitants,…
“Unless some great and capital change suddenly takes place,” Gen. George Washington wrote from Valley Forge on December 23, 1777,[1] to Henry Laurens, the…
Lord Dunmore, John Murray, the 4th Earl of Dunmore (1730-1809) and Royal Governor of Virginia (1771-1776),[1] was an important political and military figure during…
Nestled amid factories, automotive shops and diners in an industrial section of southern New York, just a short walk from the Bronx boundary, sits…
On Saturday September 17, 1938 New York governor Herbert H. Lehman and 5,000 others assembled in Poughkeepsie to observe the sesquicentennial of the Empire…
James Fenimore Cooper published his wildly popular second novel, The Spy: a Tale of the Neutral Ground, in 1821. The book tells the story…
Georgia’s fragile independence within the new American republic was shattered on December 29, 1778, when British troops attacked Savannah. Despite clear signs that the…
We recently ran an article about monuments commemorating the American Revolution. We asked our contributors: If you could commission a monument, what would you…
Revolutionary Networks: The Business and Politics of Printing the News, 1763-1789 by Joseph M. Adelman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019) An explosion of new…
Under the leadership of Royal Governor Patrick Tonyn, East Florida remained in the hands of the British Crown during the Imperial Crisis, not an…
On this week’s Dispatches host Brady Crytzer interviews educator and JAR contributor Joseph Wroblewski on the operations of the Queen’s Rangers during the British occupation of…
This article is a companion piece to one of mine that appeared in this journal on July 18, 2017. Beginning with the start of the…
In a country in which one of the main constitutional principles is separation of church and state, it is counter-intuitive to find that there…
The American invasion of Quebec of 1775-1776 failed to achieve its primary objective: to bring into the fold what the Continental Congress referred to…
On this week’s Dispatches host Brady Crytzer interviews budding scholar Tristan J. New about Joseph Galloway and his proposal for a peaceful political resolution with…
Besides dealing with events elsewhere, this article relates in particular the plight of the Carolina loyalists and the way in which British ascendancy in…