American Political History

He was the richest man in America, and for most of the Revolution he was also its treasury. When the United States had no money and no credit, it borrowed on the name of Robert Morris — a Philadelphia...

13 Elo 30min

In the spring of 1783, with the Revolution all but won, the most dangerous enemy of the United States was its own army. Unpaid for years, cheated of their promised pensions, the officers camped at New...

11 Elo 35min

On December 23rd, 1783, in the Senate chamber at Annapolis, George Washington did the thing conquerors never do: he laid his commission at the feet of the Congress and went home to be a farmer — an ac...

8 Elo 38min

Yorktown did not end the American Revolution. It ended the will to fight it — and that will broke not in Virginia but in London, and then in a rented room in Paris. This is the story of how the war wa...

5 Heinä 202539min

In October 1781, two armies closed a ring around a British force dug in at a Virginia tobacco port — and the American Revolution reached the field where it would be decided. This is the story of the s...

4 Heinä 202526min

The most important battle of the American Revolution was fought without a single American in it. In September 1781, everything came down to one fact George Washington had preached for six years: whoev...

4 Heinä 202527min

After Charleston and Camden, the Continental Army in the South was a wreck — and George Washington sent it a limping Rhode Island foundryman named Nathanael Greene, who promptly did the one thing ever...

4 Heinä 202531min

History is written by the winners, and the winners of the American Revolution wrote the Loyalists down as a handful of rich cowards. The truth was larger: as many as a fifth of Americans stayed loyal ...

4 Heinä 202523min