Further Viewings
Recommended Readings about the American Revolution
The Southern Strategy by
This book presents a reexamination of major Southern battles and tactics in the war for independence. A finalist for the 2005 Distinguished Writing Award of the Army Historical Foundation and the 2005 Thomas Fleming Book Award of the American Revolution Round Table of Philadelphia, ""The Southern Strategy"" shifts the traditional vantage point of the American Revolution from the Northern colonies to the South in this study of the critical period from 1775 to the spring of 1780. David K. Wilson suggests that the paradox of the British defeat in 1781 - after Crown armies had crushed all organized resistance in South Carolina and Georgia - makes sense only if one understands the fundamental flaws in what modern historians label Britain's 'Southern Strategy.'In his assessment, he closely examines battles and skirmishes to construct a comprehensive military history of the Revolution in the South through May 1780. A cartographer and student of battlefield geography, Wilson includes detailed, original battle maps and orders of battle for each engagement. Appraising the strategy and tactics of the most significant conflicts, he tests the thesis that the British could raise the manpower they needed to win in the South by tapping a vast reservoir of Southern Loyalists and finds their policy flawed in both conception and execution.
ISBN: 9781570037979Publication Date: 2008-08-30
Bunker Hill by
The bestselling author of In the Heart of the Sea, Mayflower, and In the Hurricane's Eye tells the story of the Boston battle that ignited the American Revolution, in this "masterpiece of narrative and perspective." (Boston Globe) In the opening volume of his acclaimed American Revolution series, Nathaniel Philbrick turns his keen eye to pre-Revolutionary Boston and the spark that ignited the American Revolution. In the aftermath of the Boston Tea Party and the violence at Lexington and Concord, the conflict escalated and skirmishes gave way to outright war in the Battle of Bunker Hill. It was the bloodiest conflict of the revolutionary war, and the point of no return for the rebellious colonists. Philbrick gives us a fresh view of the story and its dynamic personalities, including John Adams, Samuel Adams, John Hancock, Paul Revere, and George Washington. With passion and insight, he reconstructs the revolutionary landscape--geographic and ideological--in a mesmerizing narrative of the robust, messy, blisteringly real origins of America.
ISBN: 9780143125327Publication Date: 2014-04-29
1775 by
The contrarian historian and analyst upends the conventional reading of the American Revolution In 1775, iconoclastic historian and bestselling author Kevin Phillips punctures the myth that 1776 was the watershed year of the American Revolution. He suggests that the great events and confrontations of 1775--Congress's belligerent economic ultimatums to Britain, New England's rage militaire, the exodus of British troops and expulsion of royal governors up and down the seaboard, and the new provincial congresses and hundreds of local committees that quickly reconstituted local authority in Patriot hands--achieved a sweeping Patriot control of territory and local government that Britain was never able to overcome. These each added to the Revolution's essential momentum so when the British finally attacked in great strength the following year, they could not regain the control they had lost in 1775. Analyzing the political climate, economic structures, and military preparations, as well as the roles of ethnicity, religion, and class, Phillips tackles the eighteenth century with the same skill and insights he has shown in analyzing contemporary politics and economics. The result is a dramatic narrative brimming with original insights. 1775 revolutionizes our understanding of America's origins.
ISBN: 9780670025121Publication Date: 2012-11-27
After Yorktown by
After the Humiliating Defeat at Yorktown in 1781, George III Vowed to Keep Fighting the Rebels and Their Allies Around the World, Holding a New Nation in the Balance Although most people think the American Revolution ended with the British surrender at Yorktown, Virginia, on October 19, 1781, it did not. The war spread around the world, and exhausted men kept fighting--from the Arctic to Arkansas, from India and Ceylon to Schenectady and South America--while others labored to achieve a final diplomatic resolution. After Cornwallis's unexpected loss, George III vowed revenge, while Washington planned his next campaign. Spain, which France had lured into the war, insisted there would be no peace without seizing British-held Gibraltar. Yet the war had spun out of control long before Yorktown. Native Americans and Loyalists continued joint operations against land-hungry rebel settlers from New York to the Mississippi Valley. African American slaves sought freedom with the British. Soon, Britain seized the initiative again with a decisive naval victory in the Caribbean against the Comte de Grasse, the French hero of Yorktown. In After Yorktown: The Final Struggle for American Independence, Don Glickstein tells the engrossing story of this uncertain and violent time, from the remarkable American and French success in Virginia to the conclusion of the fighting--in India--and then to the last British soldiers leaving America more than two years after Yorktown. Readers will learn about the people--their humor, frustration, fatigue, incredulity, worries; their shock at the savage terrorism each side inflicted; and their surprise at unexpected grace and generosity. Based on an extraordinary range of primary sources, the story encompasses a fascinating cast of characters: a French captain who destroyed a British trading post, but left supplies for Indians to help them through a harsh winter, an American Loyalist releasing a captured Spanish woman in hopes that his act of kindness will result in a prisoner exchange, a Native American leader caught "between two hells" of a fickle ally and a greedy enemy, and the only general to surrender to both George Washington and Napoleon Bonaparte. Finally, the author asks the question we face today: How do you end a war that doesn't want to end?
ISBN: 9781594162619Publication Date: 2016-09-01
The American Revolution by
The American Revolution gave birth to a new world republic and a philosophy based on freedom, liberty, and equality. The philosophical concepts articulated by the revolutionary leaders have become a model of positive change for people around the world. This concise reference guide includes an overview essay that traces the course of the Revolution and five essays on various aspects of the conflict. Also included are biographical sketches of 19 important historical figures and a selection of primary documents with introductions by the author. A timeline and annotated bibliography compliment the text, making this the perfect starting point for student and general-reader research, and a fresh survey of the events that brought about the birth of the American republic. The essays in this book focus on the events and conditions that led the American colonies to revolt, the war itself, life on the home front, revolutionary diplomacy, and a concluding, interpretive essay on the lasting impact of the American Revolution. The biographical sketches include a wide array of important actors on the stage, including Abigail Adams, John Adams, George III, George Washington, Mercy Otis Warren, among others. Primary documents include excerpts from Thomas Paine's Common Sense, The Proclamation of Lord Dunmore offering Freedom to Slaves Belonging to the Rebels in Virginia of 1775, The Articles of Federation, and the Treaty of Paris, among others. Every generation needs to reinterpret its history to reflect its own needs and ideals. This book offers a new look at this pivotal time in world history.
ISBN: 0313317925Publication Date: 2003-08-30
The Creation of America by
In the standard presentation of the American Revolution, a ragtag assortment of revolutionaries, inspired by ideals of liberty and justice, throw off the yoke of the British empire and bring democracy to the New World. In place of this fairy tale, Francis Jennings presents a realistic alternative: a privileged elite, dreaming of empire, clone their own empire from the British. This book, first published in 2000, shows that the colonists intended from the first to conquer American Indians. Though subordinate to the British crown, the colonists ruled over beaten native peoples. Some colonists bought Africans as slaves and rigidly ruled over them, and the colonists invented racial gradation to justify conquests and oppression. Jennings reveals as war propaganda the revolutionary rhetoric about liberty and virtue. Including the whole population in this meticulously documented history, Jennings provides an eloquent explanation for a host of anomalies, ambiguities, and iniquities that have followed in the American Revolution's wake.
ISBN: 9780521664813Publication Date: 2000-07-31
Origin of the American Revolution: 1759-1766 by
Origin of the American Revolution is the first of Bernhard Knollenberg's two-part history concerning the basis of the conflict between England and its North American colonies from 1759 to 1766. This compact narrative history, written more than a generation ago, has been widely unavailable, until now. In this first volume, Origin of the American Revolution, Knollenberg knits together the most important and coincident prerequisite conditions that made the colonial break with England inevitable. The book is in great measure a work of imperial history, in that it views the advent of the American Revolution within the context of the first British Empire. In this context, Knollenberg views the movement toward independence as the failure of the British to solve the problem of empire. Origin of the American Revolution provides a concise treatment of a time period crucial to the making of the American nation. Knollenberg is one of the first historians to move the Anglo-American dispute back in time, and his work throughout is deeply researched and clearly and engagingly written.
ISBN: 9780865973824Publication Date: 2002-12-01
Remembering the Revolution by
In today's United States, the legacy of the American Revolution looms large. From presidential speeches to bestselling biographies, from conservative politics to school pageants, everybody knows something about the Revolution. Yet what was a messy, protracted, divisive, and destructive war has calcified into a glorified founding moment of the American nation. Disparate events with equally diverse participants have been reduced to a few key scenes and characters, presided over by well-meaning and wise old men. Recollections of the Revolution did not always take today's form. In this lively collection of essays, historians and literary scholars consider how the first three generations of American citizens interpreted their nation's origins. The volume introduces readers to a host of individuals and groups both well known and obscure, from Molly Pitcher and "forgotten father" John Dickinson to African American Baptists in Georgia and antebellum pacifists. They show how the memory of the Revolution became politicized early in the nation's history, as different interests sought to harness its meaning for their own ends. No single faction succeeded, and at the outbreak of the Civil War the American people remained divided over how to remember the Revolution.
ISBN: 9781625340337Publication Date: 2013-10-03
Colonial America and the American Revolution by
For the casual traveler or dedicated history enthusiast, this definitive guide gives an illuminating glimpse into our nation's early days and struggle for independence. Relive the colonial days through a trip to Williamsburg, Virginia. Imagine being a soldier hanging on through the long cold winter through a visit to Valley Forge. Explore Washington Crossing State Park, where one of George Washington's pivotal victories took place on Christmas night in 1776.
ISBN: 9780976601326Publication Date: 2006-06-01
The First American Army by
This is the first book that offers a you-are-there look at the American Revolution through the eyes of the enlisted men. Through searing portraits of individual soldiers, Bruce Chadwick, author of George Washington's War, brings alive what it was like to serve then in the American army. With interlocking stories of ordinary Americans, he evokes what it meant to face brutal winters, starvation, terrible homesickness and to go into battle against the much-vaunted British regulars and their deadly Hessian mercenaries. The reader lives through the experiences of those terrible and heroic times when a fifteen-year-old fifer survived the Battle of Bunker Hill, when Private Josiah Atkins escaped unscathed from the bloody battles in New York and when a doctor and a minister shared the misery of the wounded and dying. These intertwining stories are drawn from their letters and never-before-quoted journals found in the libraries belonging to the camps where Washington quartered his troops during those desperate years.
ISBN: 9781402207532Publication Date: 2006-10-01
The Struggle for Sea Power by
The American Revolution involved a naval war of immense scope and variety, including no fewer than twenty-two navies fighting on five oceans--to say nothing of rivers and lakes. In no other war were so many large-scale fleet battles fought, one of which was the most strategically significant naval battle in all of British, French, and American history. Simultaneous naval campaigns were fought in the English Channel, the North and Mid-Atlantic, the Mediterranean, off South Africa, in the Indian Ocean, the Caribbean, the Pacific, the North Sea and, of course, off the eastern seaboard of America. Not until the Second World War would any nation actively fight in so many different theaters. In The Struggle for Sea Power, Sam Willis traces every key military event in the path to American independence from a naval perspective, and he also brings this important viewpoint to bear on economic, political, and social developments that were fundamental to the success of the Revolution. In doing so Willis offers valuable new insights into American, British, French, Spanish, Dutch, and Russian history. This unique account of the American Revolution gives us a new understanding of the influence of sea power upon history, of the American path to independence, and of the rise and fall of the British Empire.
ISBN: 9780393239928Publication Date: 2016-02-15
