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The Battle of Green Spring: A Footnote on the Road to Yorktown
byEnsign Ebenezer Denny calculated that he went from a green officer to a combat veteran in all of four minutes. Yet in those harsh…
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In the Footsteps of Captain Johann Ewald at Yorktown
byAs night slowly gives into morning the salty breeze brings a mist across the suffocating sulphury air filled with fireballs. The fireballs pass each…
The Aborted Virginia Campaign and Its Aftermath, May to August 1781
byLt. General Earl Cornwallis, the British general officer commanding in the south, arrived at Petersburg in the morning of May 20, 1781, having marched…
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Captain Septimus Noel: Ordnance Fleet Commodore
byHistory occasionally provides a pleasant surprise by revealing the record of an ordinary person who, thrust into a unique role, performed extraordinary services for…
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The Decision that Lost Britain the War: An Enigma Now Resolved
byIn this article I address the absurdity of Cornwallis’s decision to march from Wilmington, North Carolina, to Virginia and the light thrown on it…
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Happy Fourth of July! . . . and a Question
byFor something special this Independence Day, we asked JAR contributors a simple but thought-provoking question. Their answers are insightful and remind us of the…
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Richard Augustus Wyvill: A British Officer’s Journal as the War Winds Down
byThe 38th Regiment of Foot disembarked in Boston in the summer of 1774, and spent the next nine years in America involved in some…
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The Love Letters of Alexander Scammell
byOne of our oldest known stories is The Odyssey, in which Odysseus travels from the Siege of Troy on various adventures to reach his…
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George Washington’s 1781 Campaign Design Revealed
byGeorge Washington closed a July 31, 1788 letter to Noah Webster noting that Webster’s “desire of obtaining truth is very laudable, I wish I…
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From Yorktown to England ― Cornwallis’s fraught passage home
byBased preponderantly on The Cornwallis Papers,[1] this article describes in part Cornwallis’s last days in Virginia, his brief sojourn in New York, and events…
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The American Gunners at Yorktown
byThe Siege of Yorktown began subsequent to the movement of about fifty thousand American and French soldiers and sailors to eastern Virginia, twenty-eight thousand…
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Yorktown National Battlefield: The Encampment Tour
byAlmost anyone that develops a passion for history can point to an event deep within themselves that spawned an imaginative interpretation of events, and…
The Three Letters that determined the Campaign to Yorktown
byIn the spring of 1781, Washington’s army was small (he would report on July 15 that he had only 5,835 rank and file); “the…
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How Yorktown Almost Couldn’t Afford to Happen
byGen. George Washington, from the point of view of Americans being trapped at “York,”[1] wrote these prophetic words- These by being upon a narrow…
A Look at Lauzun in L’Expédition Particulière
byBest known in this country for his role in the in the Yorktown Campaign of the American Revolution, the Duc de Lauzun (April 13,…
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Command and Control During the Yorktown Campaign
byThe definitions of joint command of land, maritime, air and other forces as practiced by the United States military today were unknown to those…
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The Final Theaters, the Final Fights
byThe British defeat at Yorktown in October 1781 did little to convince those fighting that peace was near. Gen. George Washington pleaded with his…
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A Yorktown Footnote: The Last Days of Col. Alexander Scammell
byThe highest ranking Continental Army officer to be killed during the Siege of Yorktown in 1781 was Col. Alexander Scammell, 34-year old commander of…
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Almost Yorktown
byThe circumstances that forced the surrender of Cornwallis’s army at Yorktown are familiar enough. The British were trapped on a peninsula, Washington’s Continental Army…
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Revolutionary News: 10 Breaking Stories
byIn April 1775, reports about the bloodshed at Lexington and Concord took five days to reach Philadelphia and nearly three weeks to reach Charleston,…
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Washington’s Deviation to Virginia
byGeneral Washington received the disappointing news on August 14, 1781. Comte De Grasse’s powerful French fleet of nearly thirty warships was not sailing for…
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Top 10 Battles of the Revolutionary War
byThe outcome of a war depends on far more than individual battles, but the battles are compelling to study; everyone has a favorite. The…
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Colonel Lewis Nicola: Soldier, Scientist and Man of Letters (part 2)
byContinued from yesterday. Click here to read part 1. When British attack upon Philadelphia threatened in 1776, Nicola was appointed Town Major for the…