If you have any questions about any of the historical background of the book, feel free to comment or e-mail me! I love talking about this stuff. This is only a partial bibliography with some of my favorite sources.
1. Masquerade: The Life and Times of Deborah Sampson, Continental Soldier, by Alfred F. Young. An excellent biography of the most successful female soldier of the Revolutionary War (that we know of!).
2. Belonging to the Army: Camp Followers and Community during the American Revolution by Holly A. Mayer. The book taught me so much about camp life as well as about women’s roles in the Continental Army.
3. George Washington and the Jews, by Fritz Hirschfeld. There are a lot of sources listing Jewish soldiers and Patriots during the Revolutionary War and summarizing their contributions; this was my favorite.
4. Jews and the American Revolution: Haym Salomon and Others, by Laurens R. Schwartz. This one was less comprehensive overall, but an amazing resource on Haym Salomon, a notable Jewish spy from New York.
5. Beat the Last Drum: the Siege of Yorktown by Thomas Fleming. This was written in the 60s and the style is a little dated, but this book is absolutely perfect if you’re trying to plot a day-by-day timeline of the siege. There’s a map! Thomas Fleming might be my favorite Revolutionary War historian, I’ve loved everything of his I read. You can tell he doesn’t much like Hamilton in this book, and then watch A. Ham grow on him over the decades his career spans!
6. Everybody’s Revolution: A New Look at the People Who Won America’s Freedom, also by Thomas Fleming. This is a children’s picture book about the diversity of the Continental Army, and it’s GREAT.
7. The Battle for New York: The City at the Heart of the American Revolution by Barnet Schecter. A detailed and readable run-down of New York’s experience throughout the war.
8. Alexander Hamilton: the Formative Years by Michael E. Newton. An exhaustively footnoted biography that gave me a lot of vital information about what A. Ham’s battalion was doing at any given moment.
9. Invisible Ink: Spycraft of the American Revolution by John A. Nagy. This book desperately needed a better editor, but the information in it was invaluable in creating Nathan’s backstory.
I also relied heavily on eyewitness accounts of siege and the storming of the Redoubt:
Joseph Plumb Martin
John Laurens (link goes to Google Books)
Stephen Olney (a captain in John Hunter’s Rhode Island Regiment)
James Duncan: part 1 and part 2 (links go to Google Books)
James Thacher, MD
Johann Conrad Doehla (a Hessian) (link goes to JStor)
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