About
I'm the author of "After Yorktown" (Westholme Publishing, November 2015), which questions assumptions about commonly held beliefs—American exceptionalism, that the Revolution ended with the British surrender at Yorktown., or that the war ended in America. (Hint: The last battle of the American Revolution was fought in India.)
As a former newspaper reporter, I try to separate fact from opinion, something many historians have trouble doing. (How many accounts of the Revolution have you read that talk about the "patriots" or "Americans," as if loyalists, Indians, and slaves were as patriotic and American in their opposition to Washington and his rebels?) I also try to put flesh and bones on these distant 18th century people: The "granny picture" of Washington on our one-dollar bill doesn't him or his opponents justice.
I was raised with the Revolution around me, born in Schenectady, NY—the frontier during the Revolution—and raised in Boston.
I live in the state named after a Revolutionary-era land speculator and general you might have heard of—Washington. From my office in Seattle, I see the Space Needle, Lake Union, and the Olympic Mountains. I root for the Mariners.
Featured Work
After Yorktown
After Yorktown questions assumptions—and tells a heck of a good story.
It's a story of people:
• The only general to surrender to both Washington and Napoleon.
• Washington's aide (and, speculatively, Alexander Hamilton's lover) who had a suicide wish.
• Admiral "Satan" who nearly made India a French colony.
• A British admiral whose greed and anti-Semitism made him a pariah…until he became a hero.
• Daniel Boone and how he helped botch a battle that killed one of his sons.
• A loyalist whose real life belied his reputation as a "white renegade."
• Alexander Leslie, a Forrest Gump–type character who almost started the Revolution and closed one of its last chapters.
It's also the story of how the American Revolution became a world war—from Hudson Bay to South America, Cape Town to Arkansas, Gibraltar to Schenectady.
Finally, it asks the question we face today: How do you end a war that doesn't want to end?
