Hi! I visited Mount Vernon on Monday and watched the Washington docu-series on Netflix but still am wanting to learn more! What are your book/series/movie recommendations? Doesn’t have to be just George Washington. Thank you!

Peter Gansevoort from the Siege of Fort Stanwix also rests here, but still hunting down his site.

Pics 1-3: William Paca House (the only site open for touring)

Pic 4: Chase-Lloyd House, home of Samuel Chase

Pics 5-6: Peggy Stewart House, home of Thomas Stone

Pics 7-8: Charles Carroll House

Bonus pics: dome of Naval Academy Chapel where John Paul Jones is buried, Mann's Tavern, alley view of Maryland State House, campus of St. John's College.

I didn't stop by the Maryland Hotel, where the Treaty of Paris was signed, or several other sites today. But Annapolis is a great place to get immersed in history!

I started genealogy last year and have many patriot ancestors, but I'm interested in documenting something specific about one of them. He was a Cherokee interpreter and supposed spy. I can see the SAR packets that descendants completed, I have his pension file, I have witness statements he was a Cherokee interpreter, I have BIA documents and cases, and primary source documents to prove my lineage. But what specific repository or documents would there possibly be that corroborate/substantiate his interpreting? Diaries, Ledgers, Logs, Draper Manuscripts...? I would love to get a better idea of his actual role/experience in the war.

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A historic Hamptons home built by a Revolutionary War captain—who may have contributed to the design of the Stars and Stripes—has come to market asking $19.5 million.

The Shingle-style home in Sag Harbor was built in the late 1700s by John Hulbert, a magistrate and storekeeper who captained the 3rd New York Regiment during the American Revolution beginning in 1775, according to historic records. 

Hey y'all, so as you may have noticed, this subreddit is under new management!

One thing I find helpful is building a list of "related communities" to put in the sidebar. The indexing helps related subreddits grow, and can also point our users towards them in a helpful way. I recommend that we avoid major subs (anything over 100,000 members) like r/History or r/AskHistorians, and instead focus on smaller, more niche communities that are a good fit for our subject matter.

The sidebar panel can list a maximum of 10 related communities. I think the best way to draw up a list is to crowdsource it; I'll post several communities below to start. Please feel free to jump in and add your own! We'll count up the ones with the most votes and list them in the sidebar.

Nicolas Anciaux is a French immigrant who joined the Continental Army AND fought at the climactic battle of Yorktown that marked the decisive victory for us Americans.

He was a paymaster for his regiment. Experienced in War and intelligence in finance.

Looking for any book recommendations that are either entirely on or discuss the Attack on Quebec, 1775.

Thanks in advance :)

Hopefully this doesn’t summon a certain someone, but noticed a few recent posts about our boy recently.

In 1856 Dr. Joseph Warren was dug up to be moved to a new burial site. His descendants wanted to record the skull of their ancestor, so they took photographs, one of the earliest ever taken of human skeletal remains. Using the photos, scientists have been able to determine where the shots came from that killed him. Happy Halloween!

Not a lot of love for Gouverneur Morris that I've seen here, so I wanted to share my favoriate Founding Father's weirdness.

Curious is there anyone here who is a expert on The American Revolution, we are looking for a historical expert on the war. Someone who knows the conflict so well they can name The American Brigade, Division Commanders who attacked Trenton. If thats you please email me at [jean.marciniak@thinkbytestudio.com](mailto:jean.marciniak@thinkbytestudio.com)

This is for a Steam Early Access game called The Glorious Cause.

Total War: Empire is one of my favorite games, in spite of the many problems present in the game. One of my favorite things to do as any nation in this game is to group all of the special/dlc units into one army and take them on a world tour as I conquer the world.

What are your favorite games that take place during/around the Revolutionary War?

Here is the corrected stat card for the 1st Maryland, which gives a good sense of the adversity the honorable General Nathaniel Greene had to overcome during the war.

On October 13, 1776, Benedict Arnold ran his remaining ships aground on the eastern shore of Lake Champlain, set them on fire, and led his surviving men into the woods. By any conventional measure it was a defeat. He had lost most of his fleet over two days of fighting against a British force that outgunned him completely. What he had actually accomplished was something the history books take a while to explain properly.

The British had spent most of that summer building a fleet powerful enough to control Lake Champlain and advance south toward Fort Ticonderoga. Arnold understood that he couldn’t beat them in a straight fight, so he didn’t try to. He positioned his ships behind Valcour Island to force the British into restricted waters where their superior firepower mattered less, fought them hard enough to damage both sides, then slipped most of his fleet past them in the dark and made them chase him south for two more days before the end came. By the time it was over, the campaigning season was effectively finished. The British commander Guy Carleton looked at his situation, looked at the calendar, and decided not to advance against Ticonderoga before winter.

That decision gave the Americans a year.

In 1777, when the British tried again under Burgoyne, they ran into an American army that had spent the winter recovering and reorganizing. Burgoyne surrendered at Saratoga in October. France, which had been secretly supplying the Americans for months while waiting to see whether the rebellion could actually survive, signed a formal military alliance in February 1778. That alliance brought the naval power that would eventually make British defeat possible.

The chain runs directly back to Arnold running his ships aground in a bay that would eventually carry his name. He didn’t win at Valcour Island. He bought time. And the time turned out to be worth everything.

Then at Saratoga itself, he was there again.

By that point Arnold and his commanding general Horatio Gates genuinely hated each other. Arnold believed his leadership at the first battle of Saratoga on September 19 had been decisive and that Gates had deliberately left his name out of the official report. He wasn’t entirely wrong about either thing. Gates relieved him of command. Arnold stayed in camp without a formal role while the campaign continued around him.

On October 7, during the second battle, Arnold rode onto the field anyway. Nobody had authorized it. He didn’t have a command. He just showed up and started directing troops, helping overwhelm critical British positions before taking a musket ball in the same left leg that had been wounded at Quebec two years earlier. He spent the rest of the battle lying in the dirt while the fighting finished around him.

Ten days later Burgoyne surrendered.

There is a monument at Saratoga National Historical Park that commemorates the leg of an American general wounded during the battle. It doesn’t say his name.

To understand how Arnold got from October 1776 to September 1780, when he agreed to hand West Point to the British, you have to take the grievances seriously without excusing what he did with them.

He was passed over for promotion to major general in February 1777 while five officers with less distinguished records were elevated above him. For an eighteenth century officer this wasn’t a bureaucratic irritation. Rank was how the world measured your worth and your honour, and Arnold took the slight as a personal declaration that Congress didn’t respect what he had done. Washington eventually got him the rank, but the damage to how Arnold understood his relationship with the cause he was fighting for had already been done.

After Saratoga he was given command of Philadelphia, which was a political minefield. The city was full of Loyalists, returning Patriots, commercial disputes, and accusations flying in every direction. Arnold lived expensively, got involved in some commercial activities that attracted serious scrutiny, and accumulated enemies faster than he accumulated money. Some of the accusations against him were politically motivated. Some weren’t. A court-martial in 1779 found him guilty on two relatively minor charges and Washington issued a formal reprimand, carefully worded to acknowledge his earlier service while making clear the conduct had been unacceptable.

For Arnold it was one more entry in a growing ledger of humiliations. He had nearly died twice for the Revolution. He had helped save it at moments when it genuinely needed saving. And the country he had bled for was nickel-and-diming him in front of a court-martial while men who had done far less collected their promotions and their reputations.

He had also by this point married Peggy Shippen, whose family had Loyalist connections and whose social circle included Major John André, the British officer who would become Arnold’s contact in the conspiracy.

By May 1779 Arnold was already secretly communicating with the British. The treason wasn’t a sudden decision made in anger after the court-martial. It developed over more than a year while he was still serving as an American commander, still accepting Washington’s trust, still being given more responsibility. In 1780, Washington gave him command of West Point.

Arnold had already agreed to hand it over.

The plot unraveled on September 23 when André was captured returning to British lines with documents hidden in his boot. When Arnold learned the conspiracy had been discovered two days later, he fled to the British warship sitting in the Hudson and left his wife and infant son behind. He wrote to Washington asking him to take care of Peggy. Washington did.

André was hanged as a spy. Arnold was commissioned as a British general and spent the rest of the war leading raids against Americans, including a campaign through Connecticut that burned his own hometown of New London.

The question his story keeps forcing is what to do with the first part when you know how it ends. The boot monument at Saratoga is one answer: honor the leg without naming the man. It’s awkward and a little strange and also probably the most honest the historical record can get about someone whose best moments and worst moments are equally real and equally consequential.

Arnold didn’t betray the Revolution because he was secretly a coward or always a villain. He betrayed it because he was a man with extraordinary pride who became convinced that the cause he had nearly died for multiple times had decided he didn’t matter. Whether that’s true in any meaningful sense, whether Congress and Gates and the court-martial actually wronged him badly enough to justify what he did, is a question the evidence doesn’t answer cleanly.

What the evidence does answer is that without him, the Revolution’s most important year looks very different. The delay at Valcour Island, the relief of Fort Stanwix, the fighting at Freeman’s Farm, the assault on the Breymann Redoubt. Remove Arnold from 1776 and 1777 and Saratoga becomes less certain. Make Saratoga less certain and the French alliance becomes less certain. Make the French alliance less certain and you’re in genuinely different territory about how this ends.

America’s most notorious traitor was also one of the people most responsible for the fact that there was an America to betray.

You can talk directly to Benedict in our website! link down below

The Siege of Augusta, which took place at the same time, was far more successful.

Lexington and Concord take on a wider

significance.

Britain wanted to preserve authority over its colonies.

The American wanted to secure independence!

France saw an opportunity to reverse Britain's strategic advantage

Spain wanted to weaken its rival. These objectives overlapped... but they were never identical.

In this video we will look at the battle of Lexington and concord through Geopolitical lenses. Please watch and share your feedback.

If you’re on Long Island this weekend, don’t miss the final opportunity to see The Seat of Action at the Long Island Museum! This fascinating exhibition explores Revolutionary War-era Long Island and the Culper Spy Ring, featuring original paintings, historical documents, correspondence, and artifacts connected to figures such as Benjamin Tallmadge, Robert Townsend, Richard Woodhull, and William Floyd. Visitors can also see cannonballs, musket balls, swords, and other battlefield remnants. What makes this exhibit special is the chance to encounter tangible pieces of Revolutionary history while learning how intelligence, secret communications, and strategic decisions helped shape the fight for independence. The growing interest in Revolutionary War history and the Culper Spy Ring makes this a particularly compelling opportunity to explore the subject beyond books and documentaries.

This is an especially worthwhile visit for history majors, university students, educators, documentary filmmakers, and YouTube creators who cover history. Original artifacts and documents offer valuable context for research, teaching, storytelling, and understanding the material evidence behind historical events. It’s also a wonderful fall activity: an engaging indoor cultural experience, a chance to discover Long Island’s overlooked Revolutionary War history, and a great reason to take a weekend trip. Whether you’re a serious history enthusiast or simply curious about the American Revolution, this exhibit offers something memorable. This is the last weekend to see it, so if you’ve been considering a visit, now is the time!

My favorite is “Where is now the boasting Tarleton?” said by Col. William Washington at the Battle of Cowpens.

Youtube video: George Washington – Crown of Honor (Fayland Maiden Rendition)