Lexington

Douglas Brinkley | Winter 2010

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

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

Introduction: Revisiting Concord and Lexington

Edwin S. Grosvenor | Spring 2025

This special issue looks at the dramatic and momentous events that occurred 250 years ago this month.

Given the importance of April 19, 1775 in our nation’s history, the editors of American Heritage have produced a special issue dedicated to the events of that day.

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.

Rediscovering Hand-Drawn Maps from the American Revolution and the Duke Who Collected Them

Edwin S. Grosvenor | Summer 2019

A team from American Heritage helped document some of the most important maps of the Revolution — still stored in the medieval English castle where scenes from Harry Potter were later filmed.

Lexington And Concord

Don Troiani | April 1974

Sixth in a series of paintings for AMERICAN HERITAGE

The first and most unusual battle of the American Revution began in earnest when the seven hundred British regulars under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Francis Smith left Concord and started back for Boston on the afternoon of April 19, 1775.

‘Twas The Nineteenth Of April In (18)75 — And The Centennial Was Coming Unstuck

David B. Little | April 1972

On a new bridge that arched the flood Their toes by April freezes curled, There the embattled committee stood, Beset, it seemed, by half the world.

Captain John Parker’s company of minutemen stood in formation, some seventy strong, waiting on Lexington Green in the dim light of early dawn. They had gathered during the night in response to Paul Revere’s warning that the British were coming.

What Was That, A Shot?

October 1960

Sir,—In obedience to your Excellency’s commands, I marched on the evening of the 18th inst.

Harold Murdock’s “The Nineteenth Of April 1775”

Arthur Bernon Tourtellot | August 1959

Forty years ago a Boston banker suggested that the Battle of Lexington had become a myth, and later evidence proves him right

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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.