On June 17, 1775, the entire dynamic of the newborn American Revolution was changed. If the Battle of Lexington and Concord was, in the immortal words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the "shot heard round the world," Bunker Hill was the volley that rocked Britain's Parliament and the ministry of King George III to its core. The Battle of Bunker Hill was the first hostile engagement of the Revolution between two organized armies, and the first time that a genuine American army had ever taken the field. It gave the British their first inkling that the Colonial rabble-in-arms they had envisioned might actually prove to be a formidable fighting force.
In this book, award-winning author James L. Nelson tells the exciting and dramatic story of the fight that changed the face of the American Revolution. He looks at the events leading up to that fateful day, the personalities on both the British and American sides who made momentous decisions, and the bloody outcome of those crucial choices, which would affect the British strategy on the battlefield throughout the coming six more years of active warfare.
A masterful new history of the first set-piece battle of the Revolutionary War, With Fire and Sword offers critical new insights into one of the most important actions of our country's founding.
"A dramatic and assiduously researched history.... James L. Nelson's With Fire and Sword is packed with incisive information on how the new American government and army were formed. And its sharply rendered battle scenes, sometimes taken straight from participants' diaries, project a vicious, gritty reality more reminiscent of World War II and Vietnam reportage than of a war which has so often been romanticized. Readers will surely find Nelson's objective history exciting and bracing."
Philadelphia Inquirer
"Top-notch research and an entertaining narrative capture all of the drama and flavor of this important event. Nelson writes with the clarity and authority of an historian who at the top of his game."
Tucson Citizen
"Excellent, vivid blow-by-blow account from fine storyteller."
