Introduction and Mission

Hello and welcome to The Revolutionary Historian blog site. My name is Josh Wheeler, The Revolutionary Historian. I am an independent historian in the field of the American Revolution and I hold graduate degrees in both History and Military History. This blog is intended to serve as a place to write about whatever historical topics might be on my mind, and knowing my mind (as only I do) this will typically mean the American Revolution. I am, however, open to anything historical and stepping outside of the Revolution from time to time can be both interesting and refreshing.

My initial thoughts are to post here a broad spectrum of content. My specialty area of scholarship within the Revolution addresses situation in America between the American victory at Yorktown and the final treaty that ended the war. Drilling down a little further my research has a heavy focus on the military situation and sheds light on numerous engagements, all of which were in desperate need of review that employed modern historical research methods. I have written extensively on these topics and have been able to provide new narratives and interpretations for many of the events that followed Yorktown, and the work continues. The internet is filled with misinformation on the time frame my research covers, hence the original motivation for my research, and once I started I was unable to stop.

Every engagement I researched suffered from terribly inaccurate historiography. There are several authors today who have taken the information written by unreliable sources the last two-hundred plus years, aggregated it, summarized it, and then placed it on their website or in the book. I have occasionally came across praise for the “scholarship” of these sources by individuals who are unaware the majority of the work they praised contained many flaws. Several of the more respected modern authors of the Revolution used some of this work without scrutiny and the situation continued. They did so, in my opinion, because their work focused 99% on the narrative prior to Yorktown and 1% on the events after. Of that coverage, it tilts heavily to the political and foreign policy events of the day, particularly the peace negotiations. Simply put, the various military engagements of the era and the lawless civil war that took place in some areas was an afterthought in the scholarship. Its easy to understand why when it came time to mention them in a few sentences they used the sentences that came before them. I can understand this even more so once I began to spend countless hours on one event at a time. In a book or feature article that already must have taken years to produce, who had time for such research in a part of the book that made up the one percent?

I get it. Unfortunately the work they pulled from was deeply flawed, and its time for that to change. My hope is to bring to both the internet and in print new narratives and interpretation that will serve several purposes. First, it will allow researchers working under the situation I just described the accurate information they need. Second, it will add significantly to the historiography of the American Revolution and help us understand the serious treasure of incredible stories and lessons from the the tumultuous years that followed Yorktown. Finally, if I do it correctly, it will provide an excellent narrative for a portion of the American Revolution yet to receive one, and the casual reader looking for a great story to fill their leisure time reading will have somewhere to turn.

With my motivation explained I look forward to posting more about my mission and my methods on this blog.