A Failed Nation - A Rope of Sand
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 Aug 38min
Independence - It Is All Over
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 Jul 202539min
Independence - Yorktown
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 Jul 202526min
Independence - Naval Superiority
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 Jul 202527min
Independence - Two Volleys
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 Jul 202531min
Independence - The King’s Friends
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 Jul 202523min
Independence - Tarleton’s Quarter
On May 29th, 1780, on a road in the Carolina backcountry, Banastre Tarleton’s cavalry cut down hundreds of Virginia Continentals as they threw down their arms to surrender — and gave the southern war ...
4 Jul 202527min
Independence - The Swamp Fox
In August 1780, the “Hero of Saratoga,” General Horatio Gates, marched the last American army in the South to Camden — and lost it in a single morning, his militia breaking at the first bayonet charge...
4 Jul 202527min
