American Revolution

Richard M. Ketchum | August 1962, Summer 2025

The battle between rebels and redcoats that should have taken place at Bunker Hill was fought at Breed’s instead. It was the first of many costly mistakes for both sides

With Cornwallis At Yorktown

The Editors | October 1961

The Revolution’s Caine Mutiny

Richard B. Morris | April 1960

In Pierre Landais the Continental Navy had its own real-life Commander Queeg. His tour as master of the Alliance was a nightmare wilder than any a novelist could invent

Soldier in a Longboat

George A. Billias | February 1960

Three times John Glover’s Marblehead fishermen saved Washington’s army; in a final battle, the “amphibious regiment” rowed him to victory across the Delaware

General Clinton’s Dumbbell Code

April 1959

Late in July, 1777, the British general John Burgoyne found himself trapped by a colonial army in the upper reaches of the Hudson; he was about to lose the Battle of Saratoga. In desperation he wrote to Sir Henry Clinton in New York, asking for reinforcements.

‘The Smoke, The Thunder, The Roar Of The Battle…”

American Heritage Staff | February 1959

It is an interesting paradox that, of the two most famous paintings of Bunker Hill, the one that most suggests a real battle was painted by Pyle, the illustrator who lived long afterward, and not by John Trumbull, the painter who saw it (albeit from a distance) and served briefly in the Revolution (see AMERICAN HERITAGE , June, 1958).

For King Or Congress

John Lowell Pratt | December 1959

Hark, Hark the trumpet sounds, O’er seas and solid grounds,

The Battle of the Saintes

C. S. Forester | June 1958

No American ships were involved, yet on its outcome hung Great Britain’s recognition of our independence

Nowadays tourists visit the West Indies by air, and sooner or later most of them avail themselves of one or other of the local services that, originating in Puerto Rico, hop from island to island southeastward along the chain of the Lesser Antilles to Trinidad and Georgetown, on the coast of Brit

Rebels And Redcoats

George F. Scheer, Hugh F. Rankin | February 1957

Participants describe the opening of the American Revolution

Rebels And Redcoats

George F. Scheer, Hugh F. Rankin | February 1957

Participants describe the opening of the American Revolution

Robert Morris and the “Art Magick”

John Dos Passos | October 1956

Skillful money-juggling by America’s first financier aided the new nation but led Morris himself to utter ruin

The Good Soldier White

June 1956

Modern G. I.’s will recognize a fellow spirit in the sergeant who wrote this account of life in General Washington’s army

Burgoyne and America's Destiny

Reginald Hargreaves | June 1956

Stickler for a point of honor, the General marched to defeat and helped to lose a war

Not long alter the distressing events—from a British standpoint—at Concord and Lexington, and while heavy reinforcements were pouring into Boston to aid the beleaguered General Gage, one ship was observed to have brought an indeed notable cargo.

America’s Most Imitated Battle

Lynn Montross | April 1956

At Cowpens, Dan Morgan showed how militia can be used. The formula worked in three later fights.

Lafayette’s Two Revolutions

John Dos Passos | December 1956

Washington was his idol, but he could not apply his American ideals to a France sliding into the Terror

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Featured Authors

Ambrose, Stephen E.

Stephen E. Ambrose (1936-2002) was a historian and professor who wrote on military history, presidential history, and American expansion and foreign policy. Ambrose has been praised for his biographies of Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, and for helping to galvanize interest in World War II.

Atkinson, Rick

Rick Atkinson is the author of dozens of best-selling books on American military history, including The Long Gray Line, a narrative saga about the West Point class of 1966; Crusade, a narrative history of the Persian Gulf War, and In the Company of Soldiers, an account of his time with General David H. Petraeus and the 101st Airborne Division during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. He has also written a three-part narrative history of the U.S.

Bird, Kai

Kai Bird is a historian and Executive Director of Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York. He is best known for writing about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnam War, US-Middle East relations and biographies of political figures. Bird is the author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, a New York Times bestseller. His most recent book is The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter.

Blight, David W.

David W. Blight is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition at Yale University. Recently, Blight has written A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation, and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, which won the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize.

Brands, H. W.

H. W. Brands is a best-selling author, historian, and the Jack S. Blanton Sr. Chair at the University of Texas at Austin. He has written thirty books, including The Zealot and the Emancipator, a dual biography of the abolitionist John Brown and President Abraham Lincoln, as well as The First American and Traitor to His Class, both finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Prize.