Sublime

In the middle of the last century, Lewis marched into the line of fire to summon a nation to be what it had long said it would be but had failed to become. Arrested forty-five times over the course of his life, Lewis suffered a fractured skull and was repeatedly beaten and tear-gassed. He led by example more than by words. He was a peaceful soldier

In Braddock’s crushing defeat, Washington had established an indelible image as a fearless young soldier who never flinched from danger and enjoyed a special intimacy with death. He had dodged so many bullets that he might have suspected he would escape the ancestral curse of his short-lived family. To Jack, Washington speculated that he was still

It was at Harpers Ferry that the abolitionist John Brown decided to liberate America’s slaves and set up a new nation of his own in northwestern Virginia, which was a pretty ambitious undertaking considering that he had an army of just twenty-one people. To that end, on October 16, 1859, he and his little group stole into town under cover of darkne

In the final war of this series, known as the French and Indian War (1754–1763), Robert Rogers organized and led a small group of frontiersmen, Rogers’ Rangers, against the French and their indigenous allies. The Rangers, who were paid by the British and supported British operations, worked from a camp near the edges of British settlement, from whi

Charles Briscoe and his coauthors (Briscoe 2003) produced an early, official account of U.S. Army Special Operations Forces in Afghanistan: Weapon of Choice.

Right before the Princeton battle, Washington informed Philadelphia financier Robert Morris that “we have the greatest occasion at present for hard money to pay a certain set of people who are of particular use to us . . . Silver would be most convenient.” 19 Washington considered Morris, a huge man with a ruddy complexion and a genial personality,

Though George was poorly equipped for such a post, lacking military experience, he vigorously pursued the position of adjutant general left vacant by his brother’s death. Inspired by Lawrence’s example, he decided to swap a surveyor’s life for that of a soldier.