100 books like Drums Along the Mohawk

I find Ron Chernow’s biography to be the most informative and comprehensive. It is quite a tome at over 800 pages, but worth the read. Chernow has fascinating insights into his character. Washington had a temper that he sought to control. Even in that, he made an impression on people. From the introduction of the book, “His contemporaries admired him not because he was a plaster saint or an empty uniform but because they sensed his unseen power.”

We see Washington develop over his life from early childhood. The loss of his father at age eleven brought him closer to his brother Lawrence, fourteen years his senior. Lawrence became a father figure to him.

After service in the French and Indian War, Washington married Martha Custis. There was true love in the marriage. She spent every winter with him throughout the eight years of the Revolution. She came with… show more.

For years I’ve been fascinated by the political history of the world that parallels the U.S. experience. Turns out that secret societies plotted a course for the world and did their best to affect the American Revolution. While they had little success in that, their influence has risen through the globalism of today and Melanson documents the foundations with incredible research.

The author meticulously follows the globalist movement from its ideological beginnings around the same time as the American Revolution until today. Contrasting the intentions of the founders with the schemes of today’s elites serves to sharpen the reader’s appreciation of why America could be special. If half of this book is correct, we’ve lots to be concerned about.

So much of history happens undercover. Few realize that the American Revolution would have failed were it not for the courage of forgotten spies, as well as mysterious, inexplicable behind-the-scenes surprises. In this book, we find specific ‘secrets’ unveiled that made a difference in the fight for independence. Well-researched, it’s an entertaining and informative read. Expect to blink your eyes and smile, and discover the soul of the patriots. 

In urban warfare, boulevards, parks, palaces, and prisons take on crucial meanings. This is the launch point for Rapport’s narrative of how the spatial layout of three cities—colonial New York, revolutionary Paris, and imperial London—inspired and channeled violent uprisings and reprisals. Rapport ranges from New York’s Commons, a park contested by patriots and redcoats in 1770, to Paris’s Faubourg Saint-Antoine neighborhood, whose artisans stormed the Bastille in 1789, and on to the network of taverns created by London radicals as clandestine hubs of revolutionary activism during the 1790s. A treat for anyone interested in how eighteenth-century cities became battlegrounds for the era’s insurgent movements for freedom and equality.

My favorite stories are those of common people, and yet finding much detail on everyday, working-class individuals during the era of America’s founding is quite difficult.

This book is a rare exception, a study of a court case that became a media sensation, leading to a wealth of information about the individuals involved. The author has carefully sifted through the legal documents, newspaper accounts, and other records, and tells the story in a highly readable manner.

It is a tale of one woman’s struggle to prevail against a power structure that was aligned against her, and the influence of society and the media on the case.

I couldn’t put down the story of Isabel, a fictional Black teenager who lived through the American Revolution in New York City.

The book covers everything from the assassination plot against George Washington to the fire that burned much of the city in September 1776, along with the everyday injustices of eighteenth-century slavery. The book gives the reader a true feel for the Black experience in Revolutionary New York.

Each chapter starts with an excerpt from a real Revolutionary document. It’s geared at young adult readers, but this is not your grandmother’s Johnny Tremain. I loved this book and the remainder of the trilogy that followed it.

Unlike the other recommendations, the plus-sized protagonist in this book is a man. Arthur Opp is a lonely shut-in who has lost his career, his friend, and his family of origin. His main solace is his correspondence with a former student, who, one day, asks him for help in guiding her son, Kel. 

From that point forward, the story is told from the alternating perspectives of Arthur and Kel. Both are plagued by isolation and tragedy. Though Arthur views himself as part of the shared soul of the lonely, he nonetheless begins to welcome people back into his life again and extols the virtues of found family to Kel.

This is a haunting, yet hopeful, book that stays with the reader for a very long time.

This book describes the rich multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, and multi-lingual communities that co-existed peacefully in Alexandria and Cairo in the 1940s and early 1950s. They forged close ties in such public domains as commerce and schooling, while keeping their family and religious lives mainly private and marrying within the community. By the mid-50s as Arab-Israeli problems spread to Egypt, the Nasser government stoked animosity against the Jews and other non-Muslim communities, forcing many to migrate. The book shows graphically how even during normal times cultural communities distinguish between areas where it is safe to mingle with outsiders and those where it is better to draw tight boundaries against penetration if they are to sustain their uniqueness. The latter are mostly areas that define them, including religion, values, and bloodlines.

Picture Jack Reacher on an NYC subway car at 2 AM with a suicide bomber. Will she blow up the car and everyone in it? I love how Lee Child keeps us in suspense, not just for a page or two, for twenty-seven pages! Reacher finds out the woman had a dangerous secret, but everyone he talks to lies to him. Each chapter ends with a cliffhanger and more questions. 

But many people want Reacher to stop asking questions: a former Delta Force operative running for the US Senate, two Al Qaeda agents, NYC cops, and FBI agents. They want Reacher to get lost and forget the suicide bomber. Fat chance! The complex plot will intrigue you. The climactic ending will terrify you even more than the suicide bomber.