Here are 100 books that Forgotten Allies fans have personally recommended if you like
Forgotten Allies.
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As a child and then as a secondary school history teacher, I wanted to help people understand each other. I always told my students that it was less important to memorize dates and facts than it was to explore history to help them understand what it is to be a human being. They should know that humans have always faced challenges and found good or bad ways of dealing with them–it is not just in their time. The books I have listed here on the Revolutionary history of the New York area created an even greater passion for understanding the human condition.
This book opened a new world to me. I had long heard about the Saratoga campaign and the Mohawk River Valley and had always wanted to know more about it.
In any historical study, I like to focus on people's experiences, and this book helped me get to know the people involved as well as the main events and organizations. It did not just provide information but also raised questions for further research and information on books and sites where those inquiries would prove productive.
In the summer of 1777, while the British and the Americans were engaged in the bitter American Revolution, a massive campaign was launched from Canada into New York State.
Brigadier Barry St. Leger led a crucial expedition from Lake Ontario into the Mohawk Valley. The goal was to travel by waterways to join Lieutenant General John Burgoyne in the siege of Albany. But Leger encountered obstacles along the way. While laying siege to Fort Stanwix, Leger received word that Benedict Arnold was leading a massive relief column that was headed their way. Leger and his men retreated, and despite a…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
As a child and then as a secondary school history teacher, I wanted to help people understand each other. I always told my students that it was less important to memorize dates and facts than it was to explore history to help them understand what it is to be a human being. They should know that humans have always faced challenges and found good or bad ways of dealing with them–it is not just in their time. The books I have listed here on the Revolutionary history of the New York area created an even greater passion for understanding the human condition.
This book helped me see the Saratoga campaign in new and deeper ways than other books I had read. The focus on accurately interpreting the battle through artifacts and then creating accurate illustrations and narratives really emphasized how history is more than just words put together to make an argument that some event was highly important or that an individual was responsible for the victory or defeat.
“Doing” history is not just digging for facts to relate but striving to understand events and the people involved with an open mind to additional evidence or suggested interpretations.
The Battles of Saratoga are cited as the turning point in the Revolutionary War. Beginning when the armies prepared to face off in June 1777 through the surrender of the British Army in October, the battles of the Northern Campaign were significant to the outcome of the War and the fight for independence. As a result of the Saratoga battles, the patriots gained confidence, the French entered the war, and the British plan to win the war quickly was put to an end.
Master historical painter Don Troiani and historian Eric Schnitzer combine their talents in this new book on…
As a child and then as a secondary school history teacher, I wanted to help people understand each other. I always told my students that it was less important to memorize dates and facts than it was to explore history to help them understand what it is to be a human being. They should know that humans have always faced challenges and found good or bad ways of dealing with them–it is not just in their time. The books I have listed here on the Revolutionary history of the New York area created an even greater passion for understanding the human condition.
This is a highly readable story of the frequently tense and tragic interactions between indigenous people and those of European descent who settled on their land. It gets down to a personal level, focusing on the intertwined lives of white missionary Samuel Kirkland and strong, complex, and important Mohawk leader Joseph Brant.
It is as much about changes in people over time as about economic, political, cultural, and other evolving elements in colonial New York.
In 1761, at a boarding school in New England, a young Mohawk Indian named Joseph Brant first met Samuel Kirkland, the son of a colonial clergyman. They began a long and intense relationship that would redefine North America. For nearly fifty years, their lives intertwined, at first as close friends but later as bitter foes. Kirkland served American expansion as a missionary and agent, promoting Indian conversion and dispossession. Brant pursued an alternative future for the continent by defending an Indian borderland nestled between the British in Canada and the Americans, rather than divided by them.
Sine, a professor of creative writing, accompanies Sam, a neuroscientist, on a conference trip to a Hotel Castle. Sam wants to present a new device, the "monitor." Sine hopes to recover from tending to her mother who just passed away.
When they arrive, Sine is in a dream-like state. Real…
As a child and then as a secondary school history teacher, I wanted to help people understand each other. I always told my students that it was less important to memorize dates and facts than it was to explore history to help them understand what it is to be a human being. They should know that humans have always faced challenges and found good or bad ways of dealing with them–it is not just in their time. The books I have listed here on the Revolutionary history of the New York area created an even greater passion for understanding the human condition.
This book helped me understand an element in my family history, as well as promoting my understanding of the American Revolution in New York and other states. Aside from my personal interest in my family, this book provided many stories of the diverse experiences of women who followed the American Army and their valuable contributions to it.
As Mayer so eloquently reveals, the Continental Army, like other armies of the time, was a traveling community that included soldiers’ families, merchants, and various other people who helped the soldiers. Mayer’s work clearly shows that one cannot understand the experience of the American Revolution without understanding the varied people who traveled with the army.
Belonging to the Army reveals the identity and importance of the civilians now referred to as camp followers, whom Holly A. Mayer calls the forgotten revolutionaries of the War of American Independence. These merchants, contractors, family members, servants, government officers, and military employees, provided necessary supplies, services and emotional support to the troops of the Continental army. Mayer describes their activities and demonstrates how they made encampments livable communities and played a fundamental role in the survival and ultimate success of the Continental Army. She also considers how the army wanted to be rid of the followers but were unsuccessful,…
I’m a professional historian and life-long lover of early American history. My fascination with the American Revolution began during the bicentennial in 1976, when my family traveled across the country for celebrations in Williamsburg and Philadelphia. That history, though, seemed disconnected to the place I grew up—Arkansas—so when I went to graduate school in history, I researched in French and Spanish archives to learn about their eighteenth-century interactions with Arkansas’s Native nations, the Osages and Quapaws. Now I teach early American history and Native American history at UNC-Chapel Hill and have written several books on how Native American, European, and African people interacted across North America.
I first read Minutemen and Their World in graduate school, and it shaped how I see the Revolution and history more generally—history is made by the decisions of ordinary people.
First published in 1976 and recently reissued, it focuses on the battles of Lexington and Concord, where the first shots of the Revolution were fired. Like Zabin’s Boston Massacre, it starts before the well-known events. The people of Concord were ordinary men and women with no intention to revolt against their empire. They were busy arguing about local matters such as whether to fire their preacher.
What I love about this book is how we see them gradually become revolutionaries, really against their will, humanizing the Revolution and helping us understand that it was not inevitable.
Winner of the Bancroft Prize! The Minutemen and Their World, first published in 1976, is reissued now in a revised and expanded edition with a new preface and afterword by the author.
On April 19, 1775, the American Revolution began at the Old North Bridge in Concord, Massachusetts. The "shot heard round the world" catapulted this sleepy New England town into the midst of revolutionary fervor, and Concord went on to become the intellectual capital of the new republic. The town--future home to Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne--soon came to symbolize devotion to liberty, intellectual freedom, and the stubborn integrity of…
Joseph D’Agnese grew up in the Bicentennial-fueled excitement of the 1970s, and spent 1976 fake-playing a fife and sporting a tricorn hat in various school events. Besides teaching him how to get in and out of Revolutionary-period knickers, this experience awakened in him a love for the Founding Era of American history. He has since authored three history titles with his wife, The New York Times bestselling author Denise Kiernan.
This is a great book for kids! With charming illustrations by Michael McCurdy, The Signers tells the personal story of every signer in a way that makes the story behind the Fourth of July engaging for young readers.
Fradin also knows just how to explain complicated issues such as slavery, or matters surrounding 18th-century life that would be lost on most adults, let alone kids. Now yes, the book is intended for readers in grades 4 through 7, but I think it is a fine jumping-off point for teachers and homeschoolers looking for short biographical readings that shed light what life was like for these men and their families during a pivotal time in American history.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."
For more than 225 years these words have inspired men and women in countries the world over to risk everything in pursuit of these lofty ideals. When they first appeared in our nation's birth certificate, the Declaration of Independence, they were a call to action for a colony on the brink of rebellion. The 56 men who dared to sign their names to this revolutionary…
In an age of splendor, a heretic king strips Egypt bare—forcing his queen to quell rebellion and plunging his children into a conspiracy against the crown.
Salvation in the Sun follows Nefertiti as she ascends the throne beside Pharaoh Amenhotep—soon to become Akhenaten—just as he declares war on Egypt’s ancient…
Joseph D’Agnese grew up in the Bicentennial-fueled excitement of the 1970s, and spent 1976 fake-playing a fife and sporting a tricorn hat in various school events. Besides teaching him how to get in and out of Revolutionary-period knickers, this experience awakened in him a love for the Founding Era of American history. He has since authored three history titles with his wife, The New York Times bestselling author Denise Kiernan.
Unless they’ve looked at the history, modern Americans often have the impression that all colonists at the time favored independence.
I’d argue that Americans see the Fourth of July—the holiday devoted to the U.S.’s birthday—as inevitable. Nothing was further from the truth. Independence was never in the cards when the battle with Britain began in 1775 at Lexington and Concord. Hogeland, a masterful historian and writer, brings to life the drama that led to the vote to break with Britain’s monarch.
Focusing tightly on the spring and summer of 1776, Declaration shows the clashing temperaments of all the players, how they tried to outmaneuver each other, but ultimately came together for the good of a nascent nation. We also learn a good deal about how ordinary citizens reacted to the news of the Declaration.
This is the rambunctious story of how America came to declare independence in Philadelphia in 1776. As late as that May, the Continental Congress had no plans to break away from England. Troops under General George Washington had been fighting the British for nearly a year—yet in Philadelphia a mighty bloc known as "reconciliationists," led by the influential Pennsylvanian John Dickinson, strove to keep America part of the British Empire.
But a cadre of activists—led by the mysterious Samuel Adams of Massachusetts and assisted by his nervous cousin John—plotted to bring about American independence. Their audacious secret plan proposed overturning…
As a child, I loved reading books about time travel, and now as a historian, I do a sort of time travel for my job. I have always been especially drawn to reading women’s correspondence, particularly when the women involved were pushing against gender roles and finding ways to access political power. I approach doing history as if it’s an ethnography of a group of people with entirely different beliefs, norms, and even emotions from us today; after all, the past is a foreign country. I’m especially intrigued by uncovering how personal relationships worked in the past and how relationships with political figures allowed family and friends to access power.
The story of Martha and George Washington’s marriage is a hard one to tell because almost none of their correspondence survives, but Fraser pieces together a rich story that shows the evolving love story of this famous couple. She makes clear that Martha—both her wealth and her character—was fundamental to making George Washington into the famous general and president he became.
In these pages, acclaimed historian Flora Fraser unfurls the story of George and Martha, brilliantly narrating the lives of an extraordinarily dedicated, accomplished, and historic couple. When they married in colonial Virginia in 1759, he was an awkward but ambitious young officer, she, a graceful, wealthy young widow. They were devoted to one another, and George was as a father to Martha’s children by her first husband. She endowed Washington with the confidence—and resources—that would aid him when elected commander-in-chief of the Continental army. During the war, Martha resolutely supported her husband, ‘the General,’ joining him every winter in headquarters;…
I was always interested in history but didn’t pay much attention to the American Revolution because I thought I knew the story. When I began to read more on the topic, I found it was far more complex and more interesting than I’d realized. Eventually I wanted to go beyond the standard storyline of Lexington-Concord-Bunker Hill-Washington’s road to victory at Yorktown. I started researching the Revolution, looking at original documents, including British materials that historians did not often consult. I found a treasure trove of fascinating stories and perspectives that I hadn’t been aware of. I’ve been researching and writing on the topic ever since.
This is the book that sparked my interest in the American Revolution. I’d been taught in school and always heard that the Americans rebelled because of high taxes imposed by the British government, but Bailyn showed this wasn’t the case. I was surprised to learn that the various taxes were quite small and that it was the mindset of the colonists, influenced by British writers, that caused them to see the taxes as signs of a larger effort to take away their liberty.
By the time I finished the book, I was convinced that the author had found the key to colonial opposition. I loved the way he laid out the colonists’ political beliefs, and I reread this book often.
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, awarded both the Pulitzer and the Bancroft prizes, has become a classic of American historical literature. Hailed at its first appearance as "the most brilliant study of the meaning of the Revolution to appear in a generation," it was enlarged in a second edition to include the nationwide debate on the ratification of the Constitution, hence exploring not only the Founders' initial hopes and aspirations but also their struggle to implement their ideas in constructing the national government.
Now, in a new preface, Bernard Bailyn reconsiders salient features of the book and isolates…
Born the heir of a master woodcutter in a queendom defined by guilds and matrilineal inheritance, nonbinary Sorin can’t quite seem to find their place. At seventeen, an opportunity to attend an alchemical guild fair and secure an apprenticeship with the…
I am an American historian and author of Unlikely Allies: How a Merchant, a Playwright, and a Spy Saved the American Revolution and Without Precedent: Chief Justice Marshall and His Times. I teach constitutional law and history at the University of California Hastings Law School, where I am the Albert Abramson Professor. I have a new book on American history from the War of 1812 to the Civil War coming out in 2022.
Stanford history professor Jack Rakove is one of the most original thinkers on American history, and this book is a richly textured dramatic portrait of the lives and contributions of the Founding Fathers. It’s fast-paced, colorful, and novelistic. It’s hard to set it aside.
* Rather than simply celebrating the 'triumph of liberty', Jack Rakove's new history of the American Revolution will stress the ambiguous legacy of the revolution, a legacy that ranges from liberty and democracy to slavery.
* Rakove will explore the complex and contested genesis of the United States, showing how the evolution was by no means inevitable and grew out the actions and interactions of many individuals, both radical and conservative, republicans, moderates and those loyal to the crown. Throughout he will investigate the complex legacy of the Revolution for notions of American nationalism and identity, issues that are all…
