Civil War Museum of Delafield Supporters,

Thanks again to all of you who attended our discussion last night on the 1776 New York Campaign of the American Revolution! Once again, I tried to cover a little too much ground in the hour and a half that we allow ourselves. Hopefully, racing through the final portion of the presentation didn’t detract too much from the overall thrust of the story. It's hard to condense the crucial events and factors that 250 years ago led to our independence...

If you want to learn more about what transpired in 1776, our reading recommendations are a good place to start:

Schecter's The Battle for New York, along with McCullough's 1776 and Fischer's Washington's Crossing, are prize-winning modern histories of the campaign. Bliven's Battle for Manhattan is older, but very readable, and is available as a Kindle book for $3-4. Rick Atkinson's The British Are Coming is the first volume of a trilogy covering the entire war and is outstanding; widely available at book sellers everywhere. John Ferling's Almost a Miracle and more recent The Shot Heard Around the World are well-written and well-researched accounts of the complete Revolutionary War era.

The best analyses of Washington's generalship are Lengel's General George Washington: A Military Life and Dave R. Palmer's George Washington's Military Genius. Palmer was a former superintendent of the United States Army Military Academy at West Point.

The top row of books on this page are written by British scholars, and thus give the British viewpoint on the American War for Independence. Some of these are hard to obtain, but you should be able to find Mackesy's The War for America, 1775-1783. The two books by Patrick K. O'Donnell are very readable histories of two units who played a prominent role in this campaign and in the war as a whole; namely Glover's Marblehead Regiment and the 1st Maryland Regiment. I highly recommend Daughn's The Revolution on the Hudson, which covers the 1776 campaign (and beyond) in detail. The Battle of Harlem Heights is a good recent micro-history of that battle and its significance.

Below I have attached some additional, shorter (!), reading material:

Here is a link to the US Army Center for Military History's 250th Anniversary pamphlet on the campaign:

https://history.army.mil/Publications/Publications-Catalog/The-New-York-Campaign/

Here is a great article by noted historian Ira Gruber on the Battle of Long Island:

Here are two articles by British historians Jeremy Black and Piers Mackesy on British strategy:

Finally, here is an article reviewing the literature on the British conduct of the Revolutionary War:

That's it for now. More later!!