When we picture the War for American Independence, we picture battles. But for the men and women who actually lived and fought in it, the American Revolution was also a job with mess rotations, night watches, short rations, and children underfoot...
What does it mean to escape? For David George, who was born enslaved in Virginia in the 1740s, the answer was never simple. He escaped his enslaver’s plantation, only to be captured by the Muscogee Creek. He escaped the Creek, only to find...
Thomas Jefferson wrote about 30 grievances against King George III in his draft of the Declaration of Independence. Congress adopted 27. One of the cut grievances accused the British king of waging cruel war against human nature itself, trafficking...
What happens when the most important document in American history leaves the room where it was written, with no plan for how to tell the world? The Second Continental Congress voted for independence on July 2, 1776, and produced one of the most...
What if the American Revolution didn’t just create the United States, but also created Australia? And what if the Muslim ruler of Mysore in southern India was, by the logic of wartime coalitions, George Washington’s ally? These...
The British Army is at your door. They need a room. What do you do? For thousands of civilians living in cities occupied during the American War for Independence — Boston, New York, Newport, Philadelphia, Charleston, and Savannah — that question...
On March 17, 1776, the British evacuated Boston—driven out not by a pitched battle, but by the sight of cannon perched on Dorchester Heights, aimed straight down at their positions. Those guns had traveled nearly 300 miles through frozen wilderness...
What happens after the revolution? Thomas Paine’s Common Sense made the case for independence, but Paine himself understood that breaking free from a king was only the beginning. The harder work was figuring out how to govern without one. 250...
What would you fight for if you were free but still not equal? In 1777, brothers William and Benjamin Frank answered that question by enlisting in the Continental Army. Freeborn Black men in Rhode Island, they gambled that military service would...
The American Revolution wasn’t just a War for Independence. The Revolution was part of a wider age of revolutions that reshaped the Atlantic World. Ronald Angelo Johnson, the Ralph and Bessie Mae Lynn Chair of History at Baylor University, joins us...