American Revolution Military

Twelve-year-old Samuel Collier is a lowly commoner on the streets of London. So when he becomes the page of Captain John Smith and boards the Susan Constant, bound for the New World, he can’t believe his good fortune. He’s heard that gold washes ashore with every tide. But beginning with the stormy journey and his first contact with the native people, he realizes that the New World is nothing like he imagined. The lush Virginia shore where they establish the colony of James Town is both beautiful and forbidding, and it’s hard to know who’s a friend or foe.

History buff Tim Rowland provides an entertaining look at happenings during and surrounding the Revolutionary War that you won't find in history books. He digs into the war's major events and reveals the unknown, bizarre, and often wildly amusing things the participants were doing while breaking away from Great Britain.

The Spurgin family of North Carolina experienced the cataclysm of the American Revolution in the most dramatic ways—and from different sides. This engrossing book tells the story of Jane Welborn Spurgin, a patriot who welcomed General Nathanael Greene to her home and aided Continental forces while her loyalist husband was fighting for the king as an officer in the Tory militia.

On April 18, 1775, Paul Revere rode through Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, shouting, "The British are coming!" to start the American Revolution.

Americans debating the fate of slavery often invoked the specter of disunion to frighten their opponents. As Elizabeth R. Varon shows, "disunion" connoted the dissolution of the republic - the failure of the founders' effort to establish a stable and lasting representative government. For many Americans in both the North and the South, disunion was a nightmare, a cataclysm that would plunge the nation into the kind of fear and misery that seemed to pervade the rest of the world.

A Daring Rescue Mission in Dangerous Territory! Spring 1778 at Valley Forge: George Washington’s army has survived the freezing and starvation of winter. Provisions and supplies are arriving regularly. Von Steuben is busy training the soldiers to take on the British when they leave Philadelphia. Meanwhile, Washington has a problem on his hands. In the aftermath of the Battle of Saratoga, Captain John Henry, the son of Virginia’s governor, Patrick Henry, frustrated in love and disillusioned by the bloodiness of the war, has left his post in General Gates’s army and is wandering ...

Harris' Brandywine is the first complete study to merge the strategic, political, and tactical history of this complex operation and important set-piece battle into a single compelling account. More than a decade in the making, his sweeping prose relies almost exclusively upon original archival research and his personal knowledge of the terrain. Told largely through the words of those who fought there, Brandywine will take its place as one of the most important military studies of the American Revolution ever written.

In this masterful biography, historian Randall B. Woods peels back the many layers of John Quincy’s long life, exposing a rich and complicated family saga and a political legacy that transformed the American Republic. This deeply researched, brilliantly written volume delves into John Quincy’s intellectual pursuits and political thought; his loving, yet at times strained, marriage to Louisa Catherine Johnson, whom he met in London; his troubling relationships with his three sons; and his fiery post-presidency rebirth in Congress as he became the chamber’s most vocal opponent of slavery.

For this mission, they’ll risk their lives. For each other, they’ll risk their hearts. Buddy Rider's little Cessna spotter aircraft was shot down twice over the jungles of Vietnam, and ten years later he’s flying crop dusters for a living while tinkering with an old WWII transport aircraft. He avoids the painful memories of the war, the bad times, and the loss of friends, until a young woman comes to his aircraft hangar in search of him. Elizabeth Anderson is a lay nun dedicated to aiding the helpless, and her immediate task is to rescue fellow missionaries and orphans trapped in war-...

On October 7, 1780, American Patriot and Loyalist soldiers battled each other at Kings Mountain, near the border of North and South Carolina. With over one hundred eyewitness accounts, this collection of participant statements from men of both sides includes letters and statements in their original form—the soldiers' own words—unedited and unabridged.

The image of the Baron de Steuben training Washington's ragged, demoralized troops in the snow at Valley Forge is part of the iconography of our Revolutionary heritage, but most history fans know little more about this fascinating figure.

In the spring of 1676, Nathaniel Bacon, a hotheaded young newcomer to Virginia, led a revolt against the colony's Indian policies. Bacon's Rebellion turned into a civil war within Virginia - and a war of extermination against the colony's Indian allies - that lasted into the following winter, sending shock waves throughout the British colonies and into England itself. James Rice offers a colorfully detailed account of the rebellion, revealing how Piscataways, English planters, slave traders, Susquehannocks, colonial officials, plunderers and intriguers were all pulled into an escalating conflict whose outcome, month by month, remained uncertain.

Serving for seventeen months during the period between the British surrender at Yorktown and the signing of the final treaty, a time when peace was far from secure, Deborah Sampson accomplished her deception by becoming an outstanding soldier. Alfred Young shows us why she did it and exactly how she carried it off. He meticulously reconstructs her early life as an indentured servant; her young adulthood as a weaver, teacher, and religious rebel; and her military career in the light infantry—followed by service as an orderly to a general at West Point.

Journeyman: A Brighter Sunshine of Their Own is the fourth novel in the award-winning Journeyman Chronicles of the American Revolution. In the fall of 1780, the American cause in the South is teetering on the edge of collapse. The Continental Army has been shattered at Camden, and the future of the Revolution hangs by a thread. Lieutenant Colonel Will Yelverton and his loyal companion Charles Cuthbert answer the call of duty. Their mission: to support the daring guerrilla campaign of the legendary Swamp Fox, Lieutenant Colonel Francis Marion. Will and Cuth ride with Marion’s rag-tag ...

In the 30 years after the Civil War, the United States blew by Great Britain to become the greatest economic power in world history. That is a well-known period in history, when titans like Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and J. P. Morgan walked the earth. But as Charles R. Morris shows us, the platform for that spectacular growth spurt was built in the first half of the century. By the 1820s, America was already the world's most productive manufacturer and the most intensely commercialized society in history.

During the brutal winter of 1775-1776, an untested Boston bookseller named Henry Knox commandeered an oxen train hauling 60 tons of cannons and other artillery from Fort Ticonderoga near the Canadian border. He and his men journeyed some 300 miles south and east over frozen, often treacherous terrain to supply George Washington for his attack of British troops occupying Boston. The result was the British surrender of Boston and the first major victory for the Colonial Army.

On October 3, 1807, Thomas Jefferson was contacted by an unknown traveler urgently pleading for a private "interview" with the president, promising to disclose "a matter of momentous importance". By the next day, Jefferson held in his hands two astonishing manuscripts whose history has been lost for over two centuries. Authored by Muslims fleeing captivity in rural Kentucky, these documents delivered to the president in 1807 were penned by literate African slaves, and written entirely in Arabic.

A French Officer in the American Revolution is the thrilling story of a dashing and courageous French soldier who joined the Marquis de Lafayette and George Washington to fight in the American Revolutionary War. It is based on meticulous research and the journals of François-Louis de Ménonville, written by his direct descendant as if it was told by the soldier himself, with extensive footnotes for those interested in learning more. It describes not only his adventures in battle and comments on military strategy but his thoughts on George Washington, Lafayette, and other major figures.

The most horrific struggle of the American Revolution occurred just 100 yards off New York, where more men died aboard a rotting prison ship than were lost to combat during the entirety of the war. Moored off the coast of Brooklyn until the end of the war, the derelict ship, the HMS Jersey, was a living hell for thousands of Americans either captured by the British or accused of disloyalty. Crammed below deck - a shocking one thousand at a time - without light or fresh air, the prisoners were scarcely fed food and water.

Messages written in secret codes or invisible ink, agents operating behind enemy lines and known only by code names, the provision of vital secret intelligence used to direct military operations—these are staple elements of modern spy fiction. Still, all were used more than 200 years ago by one of the first professional spy networks ever created: the Culper Spy Ring. This is the story of a network of courageous patriot spies operating for several years in British-occupied New York during the American Revolutionary War.