Who set the mysterious fire that burned down much of New York City shortly after the British took the city during the Revolutionary War? New York City, the strategic center of the Revolutionary War, was the most important place in North America in 1776. That summer, an unruly rebel army under George Washington repeatedly threatened to burn the city rather than let the British take it. Shortly after the Crown's forces took New York City, much of...

Covering one of history's great battles, Benedict Arnold's Navy recounts the courageousand exemplary campaign of Arnold and his cobbled-together fleet of ships against a much superior British force in the Battle of Valcour Island (Lake Champlain) in October 1776. This landmark book shows how Arnold's fearless leadership against staggering odds in a northern wilderness secured for America the independence that he would later try to betray.

"This ... narrative chronicles events instrumental in the painful birth of a new nation -- from the Bloody Morning Scout and the massacre at Fort William Henry to the disastrous siege of Quebec, the lopsided Battle of Valcour Island, the horrors of Oriskany, and the tragedies of the Pennsylvania Wyoming Valley massacre and the Sullivan-Clinton Expedition's destruction of the Iroquois homeland. Caught in the middle of it all was the Mohawk River Valley"--Page...