A new look at a famous Revolutionary figure questions whether history’s long-standing judgment is accurate
How Baron von Steuben used a tough winter to make a solid army out of a collection of untrained volunteers
How tough Henry Knox hauled a train of cannon over wintry trails to help drive the British away from Boston
How a lying poseur from Prussia gave America its army
Why a 200-year-old decoration offers evidence in the controversy surrounding the Hiroshima bombing.
Encamped above the Hudson for the last, hard winter of the Revolution, the officers of the Continental Army began to talk mutiny. It would be up to their harried commander to defend the most precious principle of the infant nation—the supremacy of civilian rule .
He was Irish, but with neither the proverbial charm nor the luck. Generals are not much known for the former quality, but the latter, as Napoleon suggested, is one no successful commander can be without. And John Sullivan was an officer whom luck simply passed by.
and how, a decade after the Revolution, a melodramatic rescue attempt, involving a grateful young American, went awry
Who today remembers John Paulding, Isaac Van Wert, or
David Williams? Yet for a century they were renowned as the
rustic militiamen who captured Major John André
Credited with shouting “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes!” at Bunker Hill, he was perhaps the most experienced general in the American army. But “Old Put” was not without his faults.
Second in a series of paintings for
AMERICAN HERITAGE
In reprisal for a Tory atrocity, Washington ordered the hanging of a captive British officer chosen by lot. He was nineteen.
Just what moved those Revolutionary War officers to form the Society of the Cincinnati, America’s first veterans’ organization? Some said it was treason
Had a tempest not thwarted his plans, George Washington might have lost the Revolution in the first major operation he commanded
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