• Complain

Nathaniel Philbrick - Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution

Here you can read online Nathaniel Philbrick - Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 2013, publisher: Viking Adult, genre: Detective and thriller. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

Nathaniel Philbrick Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution

Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

Nathaniel Philbrick, the bestselling author of In the Heart of the Sea and Mayflower, brings his prodigious talents to the story of the Boston battle that ignited the American Revolution.

Boston in 1775 is an island city occupied by British troops after a series of incendiary incidents by patriots who range from sober citizens to thuggish vigilantes. After the Boston Tea Party, British and American soldiers and Massachusetts residents have warily maneuvered around each other until April 19, when violence finally erupts at Lexington and Concord. In June, however, with the city cut off from supplies by a British blockade and Patriot militia poised in siege, skirmishes give way to outright war in the Battle of Bunker Hill. It would be the bloodiest battle of the Revolution to come, and the point of no return for the rebellious colonists.
Philbrick brings a fresh perspective to every aspect of the story. He finds new characters, and new facets to familiar ones. The real work of choreographing rebellion falls to a thirty-three year old physician named Joseph Warren who emerges as the on-the-ground leader of the Patriot cause and is fated to die at Bunker Hill. Others in the cast include Paul Revere, Warrens fianc the poet Mercy Scollay, a newly recruited George Washington, the reluctant British combatant General Thomas Gage and his more bellicose successor William Howe, who leads the three charges at Bunker Hill and presides over the claustrophobic cauldron of a city under siege as both sides play a nervy game of brinkmanship for control.
With passion and insight, Philbrick reconstructs the revolutionary landscapegeographic and ideologicalin a mesmerizing narrative of the robust, messy, blisteringly real origins of America.

Nathaniel Philbrick: author's other books


Who wrote Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

ALSO BY NATHANIEL PHILBRICK

The Passionate Sailor

Away Off Shore: Nantucket Island and Its People, 16021890

Abrams Eyes: The Native American Legacy of Nantucket Island

Second Wind: A Sunfish Sailors Odyssey

In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex

Sea of Glory: Americas Voyage of Discovery; The U.S. Exploring Expedition, 18381842

Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War

The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of Little Bighorn

Why Read Moby-Dick?

Bunker Hill A City a Siege a Revolution - image 1

VIKING

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

New York, New York 10014, USA

Bunker Hill A City a Siege a Revolution - image 2

USA | Canada | UK | Ireland | Australia | New Zealand | India | South Africa | China

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

For more information about the Penguin Group visit penguin.com

Copyright Nathaniel Philbrick, 2013

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the authors rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

Illustration credits appear .

Maps by Jeffrey L. Ward

Art : View of Long Wharf and Part of the Harbor of Boston in New England, America (detail). Courtesy of the Bostonian Society, Object Collection

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Philbrick, Nathaniel.

Bunker Hill : a city, a siege, a revolution / Nathaniel Philbrick.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-101-62270-4

1. Bunker Hill, Battle of, Boston, Mass., 1775. 2. Boston (Mass.)HistoryRevolution, 17751783. I. Title.

E241.B9P48 2013

973.3312dc23

2013001534

To my mother, Marianne Dennis Philbrick

Contents

Boston has been like the vision of Moses: a bush burning but not consumed.

the Reverend Samuel Cooper, April 7, 1776

Preface: The Decisive Day

O n a hot, almost windless afternoon in June, a seven-year-old boy stood beside his mother and looked out across the green islands of Boston Harbor. To the northwest, sheets of fire and smoke rose from the base of a distant hill. Even though the fighting was at least ten miles away, the concussion of the great guns burst like bubbles across his tear-streaked face.

At that moment, John Adams, the boys father, was more than three hundred miles to the south at the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. Years later, the elder Adams claimed that the American Revolution had started not with the Boston Massacre, or the Tea Party, or the skirmishes at Lexington and Concord and all the rest, but had been effected before the war commenced... in the minds and hearts of the people. For his son, however, the decisive day (a phrase used by the boys mother, Abigail) was June 17, 1775.

Seventy-one years after that day, in the jittery script of an old man, John Quincy Adams described the terrifying afternoon when he and his mother watched the battle from a hill beside their home in Braintree: I saw with my own eyes those fires, and heard Britannias thunders in the Battle of Bunkers hill and witnessed the tears of my mother and mingled with them my own. They feared, he recounted, that the British troops might at any moment march out of Boston and butcher them in cold blood or take them as hostages and drag them back into the besieged city. But what he remembered most about the battle was the hopeless sense of sorrow that he and his mother felt when they learned that their family physician, Dr. Joseph Warren, had been killed.

Warren had saved John Quincy Adamss badly fractured forefinger from amputation, and the death of this beloved physician was a terrible blow to a boy whose fathers mounting responsibilities required that he spend months away from home. Even after John Quincy Adams had grown into adulthood and become a public figure, he refused to attend all anniversary celebrations of the Battle of Bunker Hill.

Joseph Warren, just thirty-four at the time of his death, had been much more than a beloved doctor to a seven-year-old boy. Over the course of the two critical months between the outbreak of hostilities at Lexington Green and the Battle of Bunker Hill, he became the most influential patriot leader in the province of Massachusetts. As a member of the Committee of Safety, he had been the man who ordered Paul Revere to alert the countryside that British soldiers were headed to Concord; as president of the Provincial Congress, he had overseen the creation of an army even as he waged a propaganda campaign to convince both the American and British people that Massachusetts was fighting for its survival in a purely defensive war. While his more famous compatriots John Adams, John Hancock, and Samuel Adams were in Philadelphia at the Second Continental Congress, Warren was orchestrating the on-the-ground reality of a revolution.

Warren had only recently emerged from the shadow of his mentor Samuel Adams when he found himself at the head of the revolutionary movement in Massachusetts, but his presence (and absence) were immediately felt. When George Washington assumed command of the provincial army gathered outside Boston just two and a half weeks after the Battle of Bunker Hill, he was forced to contend with the confusion and despair that followed Warrens death. Washingtons ability to gain the confidence of a suspicious, stubborn, and parochial assemblage of New England militiamen marked the advent of a very different kind of leadership. Warren had passionately, often impulsively, tried to control the accelerating cataclysm. Washington would need to master the situation deliberately andabove allfirmly. Thus, the Battle of Bunker Hill is the critical turning point in the story of how a rebellion born in the streets of Boston became a countrywide war for independence.

This is also the story of two British generals. The first, Thomas Gage, was saddled with the impossible task of implementing his governments unnecessarily punitive response to the Boston Tea Party in December 1773. Gage had a scrupulous respect for the law and was therefore ill equipped to subdue a people who were perfectly willing to take that law into their own hands. When fighting broke out at Lexington and Concord, militiamen from across the region descended upon the British stationed at Boston. Armed New Englanders soon cut off the land approaches to Boston. Ironically, the former center of American resistance found itself gripped by an American siege. By the time General William Howe replaced Gage as the British commander in chief, he had determined that New York, not Boston, was where he must resume the fight. It was left to Washington to hasten the departure of Howe and his army.

The evacuation of the British in March 1776 signaled the beginning of an eight-year war that produced a new nation. But it also marked the end of an era that had started back in 1630 with the founding of the Puritan settlement called Boston. This is the story of how a revolution changed that 146-year-old communityof what was lost and what was gained when 150 vessels filled with British soldiers and American loyalists sailed from Boston Harbor for the last time.

Over the more than two centuries since the Revolution, Boston has undergone immense physical change. Most of the citys once-defining hills have been erased from the landscape while the marshes and mudflats that surrounded Boston have been filled in to eliminate almost all traces of the original waterfront. But hints of the vanished town remain. Several meetinghouses and churches from the colonial era are still standing, along with a smattering of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century houses. Looking southeast from the balcony of the Old State House, you can see how the spine of what was once called King Street connects this historic seat of government, originally known as the Town House, to Long Wharf, an equally historic commercial center that still reaches out into the harbor.

Next page
Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution»

Look at similar books to Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.


Reviews about «Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution»

Discussion, reviews of the book Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.