Here are 100 books that The British are Coming fans have personally recommended if you like
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My passions lean toward American history, Americana, and skepticism. My creed is that "Conventional wisdom is neither." I am a member of the Skeptics Society, and I often litigate and lecture on copyright and celebrity rights issues. I have been a trial lawyer for 45 years and try cases in front of flesh and blood judges and juries. My clientele runs from supermodels to celebrities, photographers, performers, directors, model agencies, photographers, and artists.
America before it was America and how it became America. I consider McCullough our greatest historian and best writer. Pages fly by, and the book reads like a movie. Washington was the greatest American before America was created.
It is essential reading for any high school American History class. It has the action and drama of a movie, not based on real facts because the real events were and remain difficult to believe. America is a one-in-a-million shot.
America's most acclaimed historian presents the intricate story of the year of the birth of the United States of America. 1776 tells two gripping stories: how a group of squabbling, disparate colonies became the United States, and how the British Empire tried to stop them. A story with a cast of amazing characters from George III to George Washington, to soldiers and their families, this exhilarating book is one of the great pieces of historical narrative.
I am an archaeologist and ethnohistorian who has carried out major projects in American Indian and Revolutionary War archaeology and history. I have taught at three universities over the course of more than five decades and have authored or edited 17 books.
The new national Congress of the United States had to invent both a government and a military to defend it on the fly in 1776. Militias had been around for decades, encouraged and supported to varying degrees by colonial, later state, governments. Before and after the creation of a regular “Continental” army, militia units were chartered by the thirteen states. The soon-to-be self-declared fourteenth state of Vermont also had militia regiments, and these also played important roles at Saratoga.
Some members of Congress thought that the creation of a regular army was dangerous and unnecessary, but Washington and his supporters prevailed, and the Continental Army was founded. Chadwick’s book is important not just for the story of the first American army, but for the individual stories of the soldiers who served in it.
This is the first book that offers a you-are-there look at the American Revolution through the eyes of the enlisted men. Through searing portraits of individual soldiers, Bruce Chadwick, author of George Washington's War, brings alive what it was like to serve then in the American army.
With interlocking stories of ordinary Americans, he evokes what it meant to face brutal winters, starvation, terrible homesickness and to go into battle against the much-vaunted British regulars and their deadly Hessian mercenaries.
The reader lives through the experiences of those terrible and heroic times when a fifteen-year-old fifer survived the Battle of…
I am an archaeologist and ethnohistorian who has carried out major projects in American Indian and Revolutionary War archaeology and history. I have taught at three universities over the course of more than five decades and have authored or edited 17 books.
John Luzader was an Army Ranger in World War II, and later park historian at the Saratoga Battlefield National Park. On the only occasion we met, John seemed discouraged about writing this book. Fortunately, I was not the only one who urged him to press on. The result is this fine military history of what was a decisive campaign of the American Revolution. It is likely that no one who has written about the campaign has known more about it.
The months-long Saratoga campaign was one of the most important military undertakings of the American Revolution, and John Luzader's impressive Saratoga: A Military History of the Decisive Campaign of the American Revolution, the first all-encompassing objective account of these pivotal months in American history, is now available in paperback.
British General John Burgoyne's army of 7,800 men intended to capture Albany, New York, wrest control of the vital Hudson River Valley from the colonists, carry a brutal war into the American interior, secure the Champlain-Hudson country, and make troops available for Sir William Howe's 1778 campaign.
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.
I became a historian of the American Revolution back in the early 1970s and have been working on that subject ever since. Most of my writings pivot on national politics, the origins of the Constitution, and James Madison. But explaining why the Revolution occurred and why it took the course it did remain subjects that still fascinate me.
We think of the American victories at Saratoga in 1777 and Yorktown in 1781 as the decisive battles of the war (and so, in a sense, they were). But in this Pulitzer Prize winner, Fischer makes a strong case that George Washington’s surprising victories at Trenton and Princeton were just as momentous, keeping “the Cause” alive at a moment when the Continental Army was on the verge of dissolution. Fischer provides a vivid account of the flow of battle and the key decisions that gave the Americans their advantage.
Six months after the Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution was all but lost. A powerful British force had routed the Americans at New York, occupied three colonies, and advanced within sight of Philadelphia.
Yet, as David Hackett Fischer recounts in this riveting history, George Washington-and many other Americans-refused to let the Revolution die. On Christmas night, as a howling nor'easter struck the Delaware Valley, he led his men across the river and attacked the exhausted Hessian garrison at Trenton, killing or capturing nearly a thousand men. A second battle of Trenton followed within days. The Americans held off a…
While I grew up in New Jersey, the “Crossroads of the Revolution,” with a passion for history, I was ignorant to the amount of fighting that happened in my home state. My decision to write coincided with a renewed interest in the American Revolution: when I realized how many stories of the Revolution remained untold, the die was cast. My passion for history, love for soldiering, wartime experiences, and understanding of tactics and terrain came together to produce something special. Now I can often be found, map, compass, and notebook in hand, prowling a Revolutionary battlefield so I can better tell the story of those who were there.
When I speak to middle school classes, one of my themes is that while women rarely appear in history books or paintings about the American Revolution, except as victims, the Continental Army could not have functioned without the women who were part of the Army community. Revolutionary Mothers offers fascinating insights into how women shaped and influenced the war and its outcome. I found it of tremendous help in fleshing out the character of Ruth Munroe, Gideon Hawke’s partner and occasional savior.
A groundbreaking history of the American Revolution that “vividly recounts Colonial women’s struggles for independence—for their nation and, sometimes, for themselves.... [Her] lively book reclaims a vital part of our political legacy" (Los Angeles Times Book Review).
The American Revolution was a home-front war that brought scarcity, bloodshed, and danger into the life of every American. In this book, Carol Berkin shows us how women played a vital role throughout the conflict.
The women of the Revolution were most active at home, organizing boycotts of British goods, raising funds for the fledgling nation, and managing the family business while struggling…
While I grew up in New Jersey, the “Crossroads of the Revolution,” with a passion for history, I was ignorant to the amount of fighting that happened in my home state. My decision to write coincided with a renewed interest in the American Revolution: when I realized how many stories of the Revolution remained untold, the die was cast. My passion for history, love for soldiering, wartime experiences, and understanding of tactics and terrain came together to produce something special. Now I can often be found, map, compass, and notebook in hand, prowling a Revolutionary battlefield so I can better tell the story of those who were there.
If you want to know what motivated ordinary British colonists to pick up a musket, spear, or sword and take on the most powerful military in the world, read Thomas Paine’s essays Common Sense and The Crisis. Common Sense was the ideological underpinning of the movement toward independence. Paine’s experiences with the Continental Army during the dark days of late 1776 inspired The Crisis, and Washington ordered it read to the troops to encourage them to stay by the Colors for one last great gamble at Trenton. In my research, I found that the average American soldier truly believed in the cause of Independence; that belief has much to do with the writings of Thomas Paine.
A special gift edition of one of the most important and influential documents in our nation's history-featured in Lin-Manuel Miranda's Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning Hamilton: An American Musical-stylishly packaged for twenty-first-century readers. According to John Adams, "Without the pen of the author of Common Sense, the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain." With Common Sense, Thomas Paine energized colonial support for the armed rebellion that would make the American experiment a reality, using common sense to argue for colonial independence. Today, this cornerstone of the American Revolution has once again been rediscovered by ardent fans of…
While I grew up in New Jersey, the “Crossroads of the Revolution,” with a passion for history, I was ignorant to the amount of fighting that happened in my home state. My decision to write coincided with a renewed interest in the American Revolution: when I realized how many stories of the Revolution remained untold, the die was cast. My passion for history, love for soldiering, wartime experiences, and understanding of tactics and terrain came together to produce something special. Now I can often be found, map, compass, and notebook in hand, prowling a Revolutionary battlefield so I can better tell the story of those who were there.
In my military career, it was my privilege to serve alongside British troops in the Balkans, Iraq, and Afghanistan. I have the utmost respect for their professionalism, and enjoy their sense of humor, especially on the subject of the American Revolution. For anyone who envisions the “redcoats” of the Revolution as unthinking drones advancing shoulder-to-shoulder, With Zeal and with Bayonets Only is a useful corrective. It demonstrates how the British Army was a professional learning organization that adapted to its environment and very nearly crushed the cause of American Independence. Whenever Gideon Hawke tangles with the British, With Zeal and with Bayonets Only informs the scene and its outcome.
The image is indelible: densely packed lines of slow-moving Redcoats picked off by American sharpshooters. Now Matthew H. Spring reveals how British infantry in the American Revolutionary War really fought.
This groundbreaking book offers a new analysis of the British Army during the ""American rebellion"" at both operational and tactical levels. Presenting fresh insights into the speed of British tactical movements, Spring discloses how the system for training the army prior to 1775 was overhauled and adapted to the peculiar conditions confronting it in North America.
First scrutinizing such operational problems as logistics, manpower shortages, and poor intelligence, Spring then…
As an educator, I’ve experienced the power of true stories to engage readers, widen their world, spur thinking, and support content areas. I’ve learned plenty from these books, too! As an author, I’m fascinated with many aspects of the American Revolutionthat I never learned about as a student. Researching this time period has revealed much more than men at war. The revolution affected every aspect of life—a “world turned upside-down.” Today, we’re fortunate to have a range of stories that help kids understand that history is about people much like them facing the challenges of their time and place.
A gingerbread baker had a role in the American Revolution? I had to know more!
I love stories of people behind the scenes, everyday people like us, so often overlooked. These stories let us know that we’re all a part of history. In this book, a German immigrant uses his baking talents to support George Washington’s troops.
Recently, I’ve learned with my research for an upcoming book about how difficult it was to supply the Continental Army with food. Starving soldiers had to go out and forage for food—one of the many everyday struggles of the time that brings history home. I also love that it’s a story of generosity. Rockliff’s lively books never fail to engage me as a reader.
Christopher Ludwick was a German-born American patriot with a big heart and a talent for baking. When cries of “Revolution!” began, Christopher was determined to help General George Washington and his hungry troops. Not with muskets or cannons, but with gingerbread! Cheerfully told by Mara Rockliff and brought to life by Vincent Kirsch’s inventive cut-paper illustrations, Gingerbread for Liberty is the story of an unsung hero of the Revolutionary War who changed the course of history one loaf at a time.
When writing my first of my ten books on the Founding Era, A People’s History of the American Revolution, I came across an amazing uprising not celebrated in the traditional saga of our nation’s birth: the people of Massachusetts, everywhere outside of Boston, actually cast off British authority in 1774, the year beforeLexington and Concord. How could this critical episode have been so neglected? Who’s the gatekeeper here, anyway? That’s when I began to explore how events of those times morphed into stories, and how those stories mask what actually happened—the theme of Founding Myths.
If, perchance, you have yet to encounter Private Joseph Plumb Martin’s classic memoir, stop right now and get hold of a copy. With wit, charm, and telling detail, this common soldier from the Continental Army will take you on a personal journey through the Revolutionary War. Lest we forget, “history” is composed of individual experiences, and JPMs are memorable. “Great men get great praise; little men, nothing,” he wrote. “It always was so and always will be.” No, not always. This “little man” earns praise not only for himself, but for all those men and boys who put their lives on the line in the Revolutionary War.
