"Few in history can match the breadth and depth of the revolutionary career of the Marquis de Lafayette. Over fifty incredible years at the heart of the Age of Revolution, he fought as one with righteous revolutionaries on both sides of the Atlantic. As an idealistic and courageous teenager serving in the American Revolution, he used his considerable wealth and savvy to help the Americans defeat the British. Then he returned home, and was a principal...

John Paul Jones, at sea and in the heat of battle, was the great American hero of the Age of Sail. He was to history what Patrick O'Brian's Jack Aubrey and C. S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower are to fiction. Ruthless, indomitable, clever; he vowed to sail, as he put it, "in harm's way." John Paul Jones is more than a great sea story. Jones is a character for the ages. John Adams called him the "most ambitious and intriguing officer in the American...

"I pity Mr. Sam Adams," his cousin John Adams wrote to his wife, "for he was born a Rebel." At virtually every juncture of the American Revolution, from the Boston Massacre and Tea Party to Lexington and Concord and the ratification of the Constitution, Samuel Adams played a forceful role. With his fiery rhetoric and religious fervor, he was in many respects the moral conscience of the new nation. "The love of liberty," he thundered, "is interwoven...

"An engaging and intimate portrait of the controversial early American politician Aaron Burr, by bestselling historian H. W. Brands"--

Pulitzer Prize finalist Randall delivers the first comprehensive portrait of Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys in half a century. He masterfully evokes Allen's upward struggle from childhood poverty to command of the largest American paramilitary force on the eve of the Revolution.

Why did the once-ardent hero of the American Revolutionary cause become its most dishonored traitor? General Benedict Arnold's failed attempt to betray the fortress of West Point to the British in 1780 stands as one of the most infamous episodes in American history. In the light of a shining record of bravery and unquestioned commitment to the Revolution, Arnold's defection came as an appalling shock. Contemporaries believed he had been corrupted...