America 250

Douglas Brinkley | Winter 2010, Summer 2025

Badly disguised as Indians, a rowdy group of patriotic vandals kicked a revolution into motion.

Jane E. Calvert | Fall 2025

Dickinson played a pivotal role in our Nation’s founding, from the Stamp Act to ratifying the Constitution, but his contributions are largely forgotten by history.

Drama at the Old North Bridge

Rick Atkinson | Spring 2025

“Now the war has begun and no one knows when it will end,” said one minuteman after the fight.

Editor's Note: Rick Atkinson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and winner of the prestigious George Washington Book Prize for The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1

The Forgotten Battle of Menotomy

Michael Ruderman | Spring 2025

Overshadowed in memory by Lexington and Concord, the Massachusetts town of Menotomy saw the most violent and deadly fighting on April 19, 1775.

Editor's Note: Michael Ruderman is an author who frequently lectures on New England history to community groups and historical societies. He earned a degree in history at Harvard College.

The Shots Heard Round the World

John Ferling | Spring 2025

What began as a civil war within the British Empire continued until it became a wider conflict affecting peoples and countries across Europe and North America.

Editor’s Note: One of the leading historians of the American Revolution and Founding era, John Ferling is a professor emeritus at the University of West Georgia and the author of two dozen books.

Discovered: First Maps of the American Revolution

Edwin S. Grosvenor | Spring 2025

Previously unknown, a map drawn by Lord Percy, the British commander at Lexington, sheds new light on the perilous retreat to Boston 250 years ago this month.

The Percy map is the first record of the first battle of the American Revolution, sketched within hours of the deadly return from Lexington.

The Revolution Could Have Started Here

Bob Thompson | Summer 2024

At a curious stone tower in Somerville, Massachusetts, panic in 1774 could have sparked a war seven months before Lexington and Concord entered the history books.

Why Is the American Revolution So Important?

Jack D. Warren | Spring 2024

Our nation is free because, 250 years ago, brave men and women fought a war to establish the independence of the United States and created a system of government to protect the freedom of its citizens.

“Boston Harbor a Tea-pot This Night!”

Benjamin Carp | Spring 2024

The dumping of tons of tea in protest set the stage for the American Revolution and was a window on the culture and attitudes of the time.

Big Guns For Washington

Clay Perry | April 1955

How tough Henry Knox hauled a train of cannon over wintry trails to help drive the British away from Boston

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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.