Here are 100 books that Partisans and Redcoats fans have personally recommended if you like
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Although I’ve been an avid reader of histories and biographies all my life, I didn’t become passionate about the American Revolution until moving to South Carolina in 2013. That’s when I began to learn about the South’s rich American Revolution history and become fascinated with Nathanael Greene’s role in it. So far, this fascination has inspired me to write two histories on Nathanael Greene, and I hope to keep going. Today, we tend to think about the American Revolution in terms of its northern battles, but if you want to understand the war’s end game, you need understand what happened in the South. These books are a great place to start.
Babits is the master of what I call “forensic history,” combining a comprehensive survey of primary accounts with archaeology, geography, and any other scientific or historical source he can utilize to craft military histories unparalleled in detail and analysis.
Here he turns his forensic eye to the Battle of Cowpens, providing groundbreaking research and perspective on this important American victory.
The real-life battle and heroes that inspired The Patriot On January 17, 1781, in a pasture near present-day Spartanburg, South Carolina, Daniel Morgan's army of Continental troops and militia routed an elite British force under the command of the notorious Banastre Tarleton. Using documentary and archaeological evidence to reconstruct the fighting at Cowpens, now a national battlefield, Lawrence Babits provides a riveting, minute-by-minute account of the clash that turned the tide of the Revolutionary War in the South and helped lead to the final defeat of the British at Yorktown.
Although I’ve been an avid reader of histories and biographies all my life, I didn’t become passionate about the American Revolution until moving to South Carolina in 2013. That’s when I began to learn about the South’s rich American Revolution history and become fascinated with Nathanael Greene’s role in it. So far, this fascination has inspired me to write two histories on Nathanael Greene, and I hope to keep going. Today, we tend to think about the American Revolution in terms of its northern battles, but if you want to understand the war’s end game, you need understand what happened in the South. These books are a great place to start.
Anyone who wants to learn about the American Revolution in the South should start here.
Buchanan not only weaves a thrilling narrative of the events beginning with the British capture of Charleston and ending at the Battle of Guilford Courthouse, he does it in a literary style, perfectly weaving primary accounts with his own insights and observations.
This book changed my life! Not only did it introduce me to events of the Race to the Dan, it convinced me to write my own version of it. Anyone who wants to compliment me as a writer of histories, please compare me to John Buchanan.
A brilliant account of the proud and ferocious American fighters who stood up to the British forces in savage battles crucial in deciding both the fate of the Carolina colonies and the outcome of the war.
""A tense, exciting historical account of a little known chapter of the Revolution, displaying history writing at its best.""--Kirkus Reviews
""His compelling narrative brings readers closer than ever before to the reality of Revolutionary warfare in the Carolinas.""--Raleigh News & Observer.
""Buchanan makes the subject come alive like few others I have seen."" --Dennis Conrad, Editor, The Nathanael Greene Papers.
Although I’ve been an avid reader of histories and biographies all my life, I didn’t become passionate about the American Revolution until moving to South Carolina in 2013. That’s when I began to learn about the South’s rich American Revolution history and become fascinated with Nathanael Greene’s role in it. So far, this fascination has inspired me to write two histories on Nathanael Greene, and I hope to keep going. Today, we tend to think about the American Revolution in terms of its northern battles, but if you want to understand the war’s end game, you need understand what happened in the South. These books are a great place to start.
Forget about George Washington. Daniel Morgan was the best American battlefield general of the Revolutionary War. And anyone who wants to tell the story of the Race to the Dan has to start with Daniel Morgan’s miraculous victory at the Battle Cowpens on January 17, 1781.
Zambone’s book is by far the best contemporary biography of this important but little-known American hero, not only explaining the genius of Morgan’s Cowpens victory, but also covering how Morgan’s early life in the American frontier prepared him to be the American Revolution’s most significant innovator in military tactics.
A Major New Biography of a Man of Humble Origins Who Became One of the Great Military Leaders of the American Revolution On January 17, 1781, at Cowpens, South Carolina, the notorious British cavalry officer Banastre Tarleton and his legion had been destroyed along with the cream of Lord Cornwallis's troops. The man who planned and executed this stunning American victory was Daniel Morgan. Once a barely literate backcountry laborer, Morgan now stood at the pinnacle of American martial success. Born in New Jersey in 1736, he left home at seventeen and found himself in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. There he…
From the author of Washington’s Spies, the thrilling story of two rival secret agents — one Confederate, the other Union — sent to Britain during the Civil War.
The South’s James Bulloch, charming and devious, was ordered to acquire a clandestine fleet intended to break Lincoln’s blockade, sink Northern…
Although I’ve been an avid reader of histories and biographies all my life, I didn’t become passionate about the American Revolution until moving to South Carolina in 2013. That’s when I began to learn about the South’s rich American Revolution history and become fascinated with Nathanael Greene’s role in it. So far, this fascination has inspired me to write two histories on Nathanael Greene, and I hope to keep going. Today, we tend to think about the American Revolution in terms of its northern battles, but if you want to understand the war’s end game, you need understand what happened in the South. These books are a great place to start.
There have been a lot of comprehensive histories of the American Revolution published since, but Christopher Ward’s The War of the Revolution is still the gold standard.
Want me to prove it? Pick up a Ferling or Philbrick or any other historian writing about the American Revolution today and see how many times they use it in their work.
Expertly documented, with clean, concise writing that can be read end-to-end or used as a reference for specific campaigns and battles, this is my go-to source for everything American Revolution.
From the first crack of musket fire at Lexington and Concord to the downing of the British colors at Yorktown, Christopher Ward does not tell the whole history of the American Revolution, but rather, illuminates the history of the war caused by that revolution-the military operations on land in the War for Independence. When The War for the Revolution was first published almost sixty years ago, it was instantly recognized as a modern classic of American historical scholarship, as well as a masterpiece of narrative nonfiction Revolutionary War history. Today it is probably the most cited single work on the…
I like thinking about the people who misbehaved in the 1700s. As a teenager, I was initially drawn to journalism as a medium for telling stories, but in college, I was entranced by the stories I could tell with early American sources. Years ago, Jan Lewis noted that many readers want “bedtime stories” about how great the American Revolution was, but there’s much more to the Revolution’s history. Now, I’m a history professor at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City of New York. Having lived in the Boston area and New York City, it’s been a thrill to write books about the American Revolution in both places.
I’ve been assigning this book to students for a few years now, introducing them to the ways that Americans dueled with one another over slaveholding and Black citizenship.
In 1779, British privateers attacked a few South Carolina plantations and took thirty-four enslaved people away (or maybe they went willingly in search of freedom). After a series of adventures, the men and women arrived in Revolutionary Massachusetts, and their enslavers wanted them back. The resulting dispute foreshadowed the debate over slavery that hides in the heart of the United States Constitution.
Because it’s not too long, I think this book is a great way to introduce students to slavery in the North and South. Blanck shows how Black people pushed back against the compromises that tried to box them in.
Tyrannicide uses a captivating narrative to unpack the experiences of slavery and slave law in South Carolina and Massachusetts during the Revolutionary Era. In 1779, during the midst of the American Revolution, thirty-four South Carolina slaves escaped aboard a British privateer and survived several naval battles until the Massachusetts brig Tyrannicide led them to Massachusetts. Over the next four years, the slaves became the center of a legal dispute between the two states. The case affected slave law and highlighted the profound differences between how the "terrible institution" was practiced in the North and the South, in ways that would…
Ever since I started reading the Little House series at the age of ten, I’ve been in love with women’s history. In college I had the opportunity to write a paper on the topic of my choice and I chose women of the American colonial period. I found that while our daily life is now very different, our feelings as women are much the same. The more primary sources I discovered, the more I could feel the fears, sorrows, and joys of the determined women who came before us, unwittingly creating records of their experiences in their correspondence and journals as they built homes and businesses from the raw, wild land.
Charles Woodmason was an Anglican preacher sent in 1766 by the church to minister to the inhabitants of the South Carolina Backcountry. Through his journal entries I feel “Roads hot and Sandy—and Weather excessive Sultry,” and “Night frozen with the Cold,” and hunger, with nothing to eat but “Indian Corn Bread” and water. I see people who “Live in Logg Cabbins like Hogs” with “Behavior as rude or more so than Savages” and children running half-naked in the cold. Woodmason’s journals, sermons, and letters provide rich and raw details of life in South Carolina before the American Revolution in the way only first-hand accounts can impart.
In what is probably the fullest and most vivid extant account of the American Colonial frontier, The Carolina Backcountry on the Eve of the Revolution gives shape to the daily life, thoughts, hopes, and fears of the frontier people. It is set forth by one of the most extraordinary men who ever sought out the wilderness--Charles Woodmason, an Anglican minister whose moral earnestness and savage indignation, combined with a vehement style, make him worthy of comparison with Swift. The book consists of his journal, selections from the sermons he preached to his Backcountry congregations, and the letters he wrote to…
The first and only full-length biography of Hazel Ying Lee, an unrecognized pioneer and unsung World War II hero who fought for a country that actively discriminated against her gender, race, and ambition.
This unique hidden figure defied countless stereotypes to become the first Asian American woman in United States…
Jack Kelly is a prize-winning historian who has written two acclaimed books about the Revolutionary War. Band of Giants: The Amateur Soldiers Who Won America’s Independence provides one of the best short accounts of the entire war. Valcour: The 1776 Campaign That Saved the Cause of Liberty is a suspense-filled account of the crucial northern theater during that decisive year.
The Revolution was an affair of people. Golway does a masterful job of bringing to life one of the most important, and often most neglected, of the American officers. Nathanael Greene was the epitome of the amateur soldiers who led the patriot effort. He was the man Washington selected to take over the Continental Army if Washington himself was killed. The book offers important insights into logistics (Greene for a time served as Quartermaster General). It also illuminates the war in the South, where Greene confounded British plans and set the scene for the patriot victory at Yorktown.
The overlooked Quaker from Rhode Island who won the American Revolution's crucial southern campaign and helped to set up the final victory of American independence at Yorktown
Nathanael Greene is a revolutionary hero who has been lost to history. Although places named in his honor dot city and country, few people know his quintessentially American story as a self-made, self-educated military genius who renounced his Quaker upbringing-horrifying his large family-to take up arms against the British. Untrained in military matters when he joined the Rhode Island militia in 1774, he quickly rose to become Washington's right-hand man and heir apparent.…
As a child, I loved reading books about time travel, and now as a historian, I do a sort of time travel for my job. I have always been especially drawn to reading women’s correspondence, particularly when the women involved were pushing against gender roles and finding ways to access political power. I approach doing history as if it’s an ethnography of a group of people with entirely different beliefs, norms, and even emotions from us today; after all, the past is a foreign country. I’m especially intrigued by uncovering how personal relationships worked in the past and how relationships with political figures allowed family and friends to access power.
The story of Martha and George Washington’s marriage is a hard one to tell because almost none of their correspondence survives, but Fraser pieces together a rich story that shows the evolving love story of this famous couple. She makes clear that Martha—both her wealth and her character—was fundamental to making George Washington into the famous general and president he became.
In these pages, acclaimed historian Flora Fraser unfurls the story of George and Martha, brilliantly narrating the lives of an extraordinarily dedicated, accomplished, and historic couple. When they married in colonial Virginia in 1759, he was an awkward but ambitious young officer, she, a graceful, wealthy young widow. They were devoted to one another, and George was as a father to Martha’s children by her first husband. She endowed Washington with the confidence—and resources—that would aid him when elected commander-in-chief of the Continental army. During the war, Martha resolutely supported her husband, ‘the General,’ joining him every winter in headquarters;…
My favorite place to be is on salt water, in a sailboat. When that’s not possible, I either write about sailing or seek out stories that take me out to sea. I was first on a sailboat at ten days old, and as a lifelong sailor and Olympian, I speak sailing. So, I really appreciate other authors who write about my passion in a truly knowledgeable voice. I’m so glad I took the time to put this list together because it reminded me of some old favorites I'm going to put back on my TBR list.
I loved this book because it combined a fast-paced story, historically accurate sailing ships, and a healthy dose of (accurate) maritime history. I’ve read it several times, and I still wish I could pick it up for the very first time and not know what was going to happen next. Best of all, there are six more books that follow this one!
As the War of Independence begins in earnest, American merchant seamen prepare to strike the First blows. None strikes more deftly than Isaac Biddlecomb, captain of the Judea, whose smuggling Activities are making a mockery of His Majesty's Royal Navy. Pursued by HMS Rose, he sacrifices the ship he loved to the depths, together with the fortune he stood to gain, rather than surrender.
On the run from the enraged forces of King George, Isaac disguises himself as a merchant seaman. He is reunited with Ezra Rumstick, a comrade and fierce rebel, as the revolution gathers momentum. On a brig…
Benghazi! A New History of the Fiasco that Pushed America and its World to the Brink
by
Ethan Chorin,
Benghazi: A New History is a look back at the enigmatic 2012 attack on the US mission in Benghazi, Libya, its long-tail causes, and devastating (and largely unexamined) consequences for US domestic politics and foreign policy. It contains information not found elsewhere, and is backed up by 40 pages of…
Schoolteacher turned writer. With the encouragement of my old college friend, the great Michael Crichton I began writing detective novels—paperback originals at first, then a hardback thriller called Target of Opportunity, which was a detective novel but included a long section of historical background about the Resistance in southern France. From there I moved to biographical fiction: novels about Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant. Then straight historical fiction, often with a Parisian background, because I’ve lived and worked in that marvelous city and can’t get enough of it.
Roberts wrote many better-known novels—e.g. Northwest Passage and Rabble in Arms. Few people remember this wonderful adventure, which takes young Steven Nason on Benedict Arnold’s doomed expedition up the Kennebec River to assault Quebec. (Arundel is a town in southern Maine.) Exuberant writing, great historical detail, and a wonderful depiction of New England Indian life. A classic.
This is the classic series from Pulitzer Prize-winning historical novelist Kenneth Roberts, all featuring characters from the town of Arundel, Maine. Arundel follows Steven Nason as he joins Benedict Arnold in his march to Quebec during the American Revolution.
