A few months after landowner Thomas Gage's fiftieth birthday Julius Gooby enters his life. Gooby proposes that the North Norfolk Railway should cross Gage's land. With the railway comes tragedy but Gage's revenge assuages his grief over others' greed and lust for progress during the railway boom.
Gage's Instructions" by Thomas Gage and Henry De Berniere is an invaluable historical document that provides insights into military tactics and colonial governance during the American Revolutionary period. Gage, a prominent British military figure, offers his instructions to officers serving in the American colonies, and De Berniere contributes additional commentary. This work sheds light on the strategies, challenges, and political considerations of the British forces during a critical time in American history.
The policy, which for many yeares hath upheld the erring Church of Rome, hath clearly and manifestly been discovered by the many Errors which in severall times by sundry Synods or Generall Councells, (which commonly are but Apes of the Popes fancy, will, pleasure, and ambition) have been enacted into that Church. And for such purposes doth that man of Sinne, and Antichristian tyrant, keep constantly in Rome so many poor Pensionary Bishops as hounds at his table, smelling out his ambitious thoughts, with whom he fills the Synods, when he calls them, charging them never to leave off barking and wearying out the rest of the Prelates, untill they have them all as a prey unto his proud and ambitious designes; from which if any of them dare to start, not onely their Pensions shall be surely forfeited, but their souls shall bee cursed, and they as Hereticks Anathematized with a Censure of Excommunication latæ sententiæ. Hence sprung that Master-piece of Policy, decreeing that the Pope alone should be above the Generall Councell, lest otherwise one Mans pride might be curbed by many heads joyned together; And secondly, that Synodicall definition, that the Pope cannot erre, that though the Councels power, wisdome and learning were all sifted into one mans brain, all points of faith straitned into one head and channell; yet the People should not stagger in any lawfull doubts, nor the learned sort follow any more the light of reason, or the sunshine of the Gospel, but all yeelding to blind Obedience, and their most holy Fathers infallibility, in the foggie and Cimmerian mist of ignorance, might secure their souls from erring, or deviating to the Scylla or Charybdis of Schism and Heresie. What judicious eye, that will not be blinded with the napkin of ignorance, doth not easily see that Policy only hath been the chief Actor of those damnable Opinions of Purgatory, Transubstantiation, Sacrifice though unbloody (as they term it) of the Mass, Invocation of Saints, their Canonization or installing of Saints into the kingdom of heaven, Indulgences, auricular Confession, with satisfactory Penance, and many such like: All which doubtles have been commanded as points of Faith, not so much to save those wretched souls, as to advance that crackt-brain head in the conceits of his Europæan wonderers, who long agoe were espyed out by the Spirit of John wondring after the Beast, worshipping him for his power, and saying, Who is like unto the Beast, who is able to make warre with him? Revel. 13. 3, 4. Thus can Policy invent a Purgatory, that a Pope may be sought from all parts of Europe, nay now from East and West India's, to deliver souls from that imaginary Fire which never God created, but he himself hath fancyed, that so much glory may be ascribed to him, and his power wondered at, who can plunge into torments, condemn to burning, and when he list, deliver out of fire. Much more would he be admired, and hisgoodnesse extolled, if he would deliver at once all those his Purgatory Prisoners without that Simoniacall receipt of money.
Paul Revere's midnight ride looms as an almost mythical event in American history--yet it has been largely ignored by scholars and left to patriotic writers and debunkers. Now one of the foremost American historians offers the first serious look at the events of the night of April 18, 1775--what led up to it, what really happened, and what followed--uncovering a truth far more remarkable than the myths of tradition. In Paul Revere's Ride, David Hackett Fischer fashions an exciting narrative that offers deep insight into the outbreak of revolution and the emergence of the American republic. Beginning in the years before the eruption of war, Fischer illuminates the figure of Paul Revere, a man far more complex than the simple artisan and messenger of tradition. Revere ranged widely through the complex world of Boston's revolutionary movement--from organizing local mechanics to mingling with the likes of John Hancock and Samuel Adams. When the fateful night arrived, more than sixty men and women joined him on his task of alarm--an operation Revere himself helped to organize and set in motion. Fischer recreates Revere's capture that night, showing how it had an important impact on the events that followed. He had an uncanny gift for being at the center of events, and the author follows him to Lexington Green--setting the stage for a fresh interpretation of the battle that began the war. Drawing on intensive new research, Fischer reveals a clash very different from both patriotic and iconoclastic myths. The local militia were elaborately organized and intelligently led, in a manner that had deep roots in New England. On the morning of April 19, they fought in fixed positions and close formation, twice breaking the British regulars. In the afternoon, the American officers switched tactics, forging a ring of fire around the retreating enemy which they maintained for several hours--an extraordinary feat of combat leadership. In the days that followed, Paul Revere led a new battle-- for public opinion--which proved even more decisive than the fighting itself. ] When the alarm-riders of April 18 took to the streets, they did not cry, "the British are coming," for most of them still believed they were British. Within a day, many began to think differently. For George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Thomas Paine, the news of Lexington was their revolutionary Rubicon. Paul Revere's Ride returns Paul Revere to center stage in these critical events, capturing both the drama and the underlying developments in a triumphant return to narrative history at its finest.
A concise history of the “shot heard round the world”—and the dramatic day that began America’s war for independence. Includes maps and photos. When shots were fired at Lexington and Concord on a spring day in 1775, few, if any, fully grasped the impact they would ultimately have on the world. This concise book offers not only a guide to the historical sites involved but a lively, readable history of the events, a culmination of years of unrest between those loyal to the British monarchy and those advocating for more autonomy and dreaming of independence from Great Britain. On the morning of April 19, Gen. Thomas Gage sent out a force of British soldiers under the command of Lt. Col. Francis Smith to confiscate, recapture, and destroy the military supplies gathered by the colonists and believed to be stored in the town of Concord. Due to the alacrity of men such as Dr. Joseph Warren, Paul Revere, and William Dawes, utilizing a network of signals and outriders, the countryside was well aware of the approaching British—setting the stage for the day’s events. From two historians, this is an outstanding introduction to a momentous battle, and the events that led up to it.
In this brilliantly illuminating group portrait of the men who came to be known as the Founding Fathers, the incomparable Gordon Wood has written a book that seriously asks, "What made these men great?" and shows us, among many other things, just how much character did in fact matter. The life of each—Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Franklin, Hamilton, Madison, Paine—is presented individually as well as collectively, but the thread that binds these portraits together is the idea of character as a lived reality. They were members of the first generation in history that was self-consciously self-made men who understood that the arc of lives, as of nations, is one of moral progress.
In the early spring of 1775, on a farm in Concord, Massachusetts, British army spies located four brass cannon belonging to Boston's colonial militia that had gone missing months before. British general Thomas Gage had been searching for them, both to stymie New England's growing rebellion and to erase the embarrassment of having let cannon disappear from armories under redcoat guard. Anxious to regain those weapons, he drew up plans for his troops to march nineteen miles into unfriendly territory. The Massachusetts Patriots, meanwhile, prepared to thwart the general's mission. There was one goal Gage and his enemies shared: for different reasons, they all wanted to keep the stolen cannon as secret as possible. Both sides succeeded well enough that the full story has never appeared until now. The Road to Concord: How Four Stolen Cannon Ignited the Revolutionary War by historian J. L. Bell reveals a new dimension to the start of America's War for Independence by tracing the spark of its first battle back to little-known events beginning in September 1774. Drawing on archives in the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada, the book creates a lively, original, and deeply documented picture of a society perched on the brink of war.
Conceived in Crisis argues that the American Revolution was not just the product of the Imperial Crisis, brought on by Parliament’s attempt to impose a new idea of empire on the American colonies. To an equal or greater degree, it was a response to the inability of individual colonial governments to deliver basic services, which undermined their legitimacy. Factional bickering over policy, violent extralegal regulations, and the dreadful experiences of conducting an imperial war while governing a demographically growing and geographically expanding population all led colonists and imperial officials to consider reforming the colonial governments into more powerful and coercive entities. Using Pennsylvania as a case study, Christopher Pearl demonstrates how this history of ineffective colonial governance precipitated a process of state formation that was accelerated by the demands of the Revolutionary War. The powerful state governments that resulted dominated the lives of ordinary people well into the nineteenth century. Conceived in Crisis makes sense of the trajectory from weak colonial to strong revolutionary states, and in so doing explains the limited success of efforts to consolidate state power at the national level during the early Republican period.