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At first glance, he doesn’t seem to have much in common with 21st-century New Yorkers. He was one of 12 children born to farmers in Connecticut. He was fluent in Greek and Latin by age 14, when he enrolled at Yale. He graduated to teach school, including a class for girls that met at dawn. When revolution broke out two years later, he enlisted with the rebels. He was hanged for espionage 235 years ago today, near what’s now 66th Street and Third Avenue, when the British Army caught him spying on its plans to invade Manhattan. He was 21....

VANCOUVER, Wa., August 20, 2011—snip... In the early days of the struggling American colonies, England refused to grant permission to the colonists to print the sacred text on the new continent. All Bibles were imported from England. This allowed appropriate taxes and revenues to be collected. The Continental Congress sought in vain to import 20,000 Bibles from Holland and Scotland. However, the successful revolution and independence from England signaled a new era for printing Bibles. In 1777, an entrepreneur Scotsman, Robert Aitken, courageously set out to publish the first New Testament ever printed in America. The first complete Bible in...

(Image: Everett Collection/Rex Features) A document has just gone on display at Mount Vernon, Virginia - the museum in the former home of George Washington, first US President. It is an order dated 1777 and signed by Washington himself to send troops that had not been vaccinated for smallpox - or survived it - to Philadelphia to be vaccinated. These troops were then to join up with the main army, where the disease was raging. It sounds like amazing foresight for its day. "Washington's careful handling of the smallpox epidemic at the beginning of the war was a significant...

ONEIDA – The Oneida Indian Nation is fully financing a $10 million theatrical film about the alliance between the Oneidas and the American colonists during the Revolutionary War. According to the New York Times, the independent production “First Allies” is expected to begin shooting in Central New York this fall. Ray Halbritter, Nation representative and CEO of Nation Enterprises, told the Times that he is looking for an avenue more effective than traditional storytelling to close what he sees as the gap between the Nation’s fewer than 1,000 members and a world with which it has had property disputes and...

The General Henry Knox Museum is honoring a representative of Al-Jazeera, the channel associated with various terrorist organizations, on July 28 on the stage of The Strand Theatre in Rockland, Maine. The museum says that an intimate Gala dinner and reception will follow at 7:30 p.m. at Camden National Bank’s historic Spear Block location in Rockland. Knox played a significant role in the American war for independence from Britain and was close to General George Washington. The idea of an American museum devoted to patriotism honoring a representative of a foreign-funded channel, described by Middle East experts such as Walid...

Arsonist: The Most Dangerous Man in America defies conventional wisdom, elevating one obscure rebel to prominent position and describing a revolutionary process that was far more coordinated and earth-shattering than previously thought. “Serious students of the American Revolution …will find this comprehensive book a fascinating read. Allen is a thorough researcher and skillful writer … a highly readable book that is never dull.” ForeWord Clarion Reviews -- Five Stars (out of Five) Westport, CT (PRWEB) June 29, 2011 Arsonist, to be published July 4, 2011, explores the world of colonial Massachusetts from the 1740s through the 1760s and is one...

Seven are buried in unmarked graves near Old St. Peter’s Church, which was used as military hospital during fight for American independence. Memorial stone in front of Old St. Peter's Church honors the eight French soldiers who died in Van Cortlandtville during the Revolutionary War.Credit Jeff Canning Photos France sent 44,000 soldiers and sailors across the Atlantic Ocean to help the infant United States win its independence from British rule during the Revolutionary War. Five thousand of them died during the conflict, eight of them in Van Cortlandtville. The body of one, an officer who was a member of the...

Benjamin Franklin owed the French for recognizing American independence, loaning money and entering the Revolutionary War against Britain. None of that, though, stopped Franklin from putting America's interests first and risking antagonizing the French when he negotiated a peace treaty with Britain. America won much better terms from the Treaty of Paris, signed in September 1783, than the Colonists had hoped for. On top of Britain's acceptance of U.S. independence, the treaty set America's boundary in the West at the Mississippi River — giving the young nation plenty of room and resources to grow. The problem was France, as well...

Haym Salomon, a Polish immigrant who funded the Revolutionary army, celebrated at annual event Jonathan Ridgeway (l.), chairman of the state Sons of the Revolution Color Guard, marches with fellow guard member Ambrose Richardson, who is carrying a flag bearing the symbol of Revolution-era organization the Sons of Liberty. Photo by Joe Anuta America pays tribute to Paul Revere and George Washington with legends, statues and even currency, but a small crowd gathered in Kew Gardens Hills Sunday to remember an unsung hero of the Revolutionary War. Haym Salomon was a Polish Jew who immigrated to the 13 Colonies and...

Greensboro, NC-- Visitors to the Guilford Courthouse National Military Park, now have a new place to find history. The federal park which is a Revolutionary War battle site, is opening a library. The library officially opens Wednesday, March 23 and will concentrate on the Southern Campaign of the Revolutionary War. It will be located at 2331 New Garden Road in Greensboro, N.C. The library, of course, is named after Greensboro's namesake General Nathanael Greene. When it opens, it will be one of only two Revolutionary War research libraries in the country with the Southern Campaign concentration. The other is in...

<p>Historians believe plans to dredge the polluted Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn could also dig up priceless revolutionary war artifacts.</p> <p>Brooklyn's Gowanus Canal is most known for being a muddy-brown, foul-smelling notorious dump site near Park Slope. For Kimberly Maier, who runs the Revolutionary War Museum called The Old Stone House, it is full of historic potential. "There could be bones, there could be uniforms, their could be muskets, bullets. Any leftover elements of battle," said Maier. The Gowanus Canal runs through the site of the Battle of Brooklyn. Fought in August of 1776, it was the first official battle of the Revolutionary War.</p>

Residents of Smithtown were proud patriots during the Revolutionary War. During the Revolutionary War, from 1776 to 1783, Smithtown was under British occupation. Residents suffered poverty, destruction and the loss of property and loved ones at the hands of British soldiers and loyalists. Smithtown historian Bradley Harris said one-third of Long Islanders were loyalists, one-third patriots and one-third neutral. Most loyalists were found in Nassau, and the majority of those who were neutral were Quakers. According to the historian, Suffolk County is where you found the majority of patriots. As for one’s alliance, Harris said, “Where you were on Long...

In 1875, the New York Herald published a “Bunker Hill Centennial” edition and a Revolutionary War recruitment poster was reprinted there. An original page from that edition exists today in the Havens House vault and is quoted here to commemorate Washington’s birthday, courtesy of the Shelter Island Historical Society. It reads as follows: Recruitment Poster “To all brave, healthy, able bodied and well disposed young men in this neighborhood, who have any inclination to join the troops now raising under General Washington, for the defence [sic]) of the liberties and independence of the United States, against the hostile design of...

New Milford historian and researcher Michael-John Cavallaro, vice-chairman of the Conservation Commission, with a one-of-a-kind Revolutionary War era confession of a local man hanged for a mass murder of the Mallory family in Washington, Ct. Cavallaro tracked down the illusive, 14-page document at the University of Virginia. He will be giving lectures about the murders in New Milford and Washington in February. Photo: Nanci Hutson / The News-Times | WASHINGTON -- In this sleepy town during the Revolutionary War, a 19-year-old Continental Army soldier committed a murder so gruesome the local historian who unearthed his treachery still mourns the long-dead...

The exterior of Peter Townsend’s house in Chester, now torn down. Contract for West Point’s Great Chain signed in Chester 233 years ago. In these days of intercontinental ballistic missile shields and missile-tracking radar, it’s hard to imagine that the national defense once depended on a simple iron chain. During the Revolutionary War, a patriot named Peter Townsend lived on a three-acre lot not far from the corner of present-day Elm and Main streets in Chester. He was a member of an important family from Oyster Bay, Long Island. The family home, Raynham Hall, is today a museum, and...

PARKERSBURG - A Meigs County native has written a book about the Battle of Point Pleasant and whether it was the first fought in the Revolutionary War. Charles S. Badgley of the Badgley Publishing Co., Canal Winchester, Ohio, says he often heard while growing up along the river in Meigs County that the battle was the first in the war, the basis of his most recent novel, "A Point of Controversy." Conventional wisdom was the battles of Lexington and Concord in 1775 were the first in the war of independence. "The controversy has been around a long time, it actually...

A callow youngster's thirst for honor triggered the Seven Years' War. Unlike many of his fellow Founding Fathers, George Washington never wrote an autobiography...His sole effort at memoir emerged from notes he wrote clarifying points for a proposed biography by a former aide and trusted friend, David Humphreys. These "Remarks" were written in 1787-88, when Washington was in his mid-50s and pondering the daunting prospect of becoming the first president....Washington chose to reminisce about the five years when he had labored as a loyal subject of the British Empire to thwart French designs on the Ohio Valley. In late 1753,...

Revolutionary war fashion show comes to Corsicana Corsicana — Yards and yards of embroidered silk and damask, wool and linen swirled through the Kinsloe House as part of a special 1700s fashion show hosted by the James Blair Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution Wednesday. The creator of the dresses was Carolyn Schiewe of the Captain Molly Corbin Chapter of the DAR in Grapevine. Schiewe researched the dresses and then sewed them for herself and her friends. “Ladies during the revolutionary war were just as interested in fashion as we are today,” Schiewe explained. And although she had...

By DIANE CARDWELL It may be almost a year later than originally expected, but Fraunces Tavern, where Gen. George Washington bade farewell to his officers at the end of the Revolutionary War and where patrons have been eating and drinking on and off since 1762, has finally taken a big leap forward in its reincarnation. The bar, operated by an Irish outfit called the Porterhouse Group, opened last night for the first time since closing in February, attracting a mellow crowd of industry insiders, people who worked on the project and longtime patrons drawn to the place’s sense of history...

America’s First Christmas How we reversed our fortunes in the Revolutionary War Gen. George Washington’s army retreated from New York in ignominy in November 1776. As it moved through New Jersey, Lt. James Monroe, the future president, stood by the road and counted the troops: 3,000 left from an original force of 30,000. In December 1776, the future of America hung on the fate of a bedraggled army barely a step ahead of annihilation. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -...