Fans pick 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.

I love a good spy story, and there are lots of them in this book—all focused on the cabal of spies in British-occupied New York that delivered intelligence to Washington. Here are Hercules Mulligan, the tailor; James Rivington, the printer; the ill-fated Nathan Hale; and a bounty of others.

But my favorite is John Champe, a sergeant-major from Virginia who is recruited for a mission to capture Benedict Arnold and deliver him to the Continental Army for trial (and the inevitable gallows). Rose reveals the intrigue and deception of Revolutionary New York, into which Arnold fled after his treason, and the characters who carried it out.

Watching reenactors wearing tricorne hats and stockings, I never associated the American Revolution with war atrocities until I read this book. What’s worse is it happened in my own backyard. After the British landed and routed Washington’s fledging army, they occupied Manhattan. 

Their biggest problem was prisoners of war. They were housed in twenty-something “hulked” ships with cannon and sails removed in Wallabout Bay off Brooklyn. Watson focuses on the most infamous of these floating prisons, the HMS Jersey.

His vivid descriptions of the thousand or so men and boys shackled there make for claustrophobic reading. After the war, the Bill of Rights was issued in response to our treatment by the British. The HMS Jersey was sunk–a ghostly reminder of our past.

Sweet drew me in from the start with this story of 17-year-old seamstress Lahan Sawyer who was raped in late 18th century New York. The book not only tells us the story of this crime and Sawyer’s courage to press charges but also opens a window into life in that era, from class dynamics to legal proceedings around claims of rape, to the political dynamics of New York in those years after the Revolution.

But what I really love about this book is its narrative force. Sweet renders the world of a New York recovering from war as he speculates and contextualizing Swayer’s life within the broader city, which she had little power to control. 

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.

This is a highly readable story of the frequently tense and tragic interactions between indigenous people and those of European descent who settled on their land. It gets down to a personal level, focusing on the intertwined lives of white missionary Samuel Kirkland and strong, complex, and important Mohawk leader Joseph Brant.

It is as much about changes in people over time as about economic, political, cultural, and other evolving elements in colonial New York.