The Whites of Their Eyes: Bunker Hill, the First American Army, and the Emergence of George Washington

A reassessment of one of the most famous battles in U.S. history combining military and political history by the author of The Drillmaster of Valley Forge.

One hot June afternoon in 1775, on the gentle slopes of a hill near Boston, Massachusetts, a small band of ordinary Americans—frightened but fiercely determined—dared to stand up to a superior British force. The clash would be immortalized as the Battle of Bunker Hill: the first real engagement of the American Revolution and one of the most famous battles in our history. But Bunker Hill was not the battle that we have been taught to believe it was.

Revisiting old evidence and drawing on new research, historian Paul Lockhart shows that Bunker Hill was a clumsy engagement pitting one inexperienced army against another. Lockhart tells the rest of the story, too: how a mob of armed civilians became America’s first army; how George Washington set aside his comfortable patrician life to take command of the veterans of Bunker Hill; and how the forgotten heroes of 1775—though overshadowed by the more famous Founding Fathers—kept the notion of American liberty alive, and thus made independence possible.

“[A] stimulating history. . . . Lockhart’s shrewd, well-judged interpretation corrects myths about the battle and the men who fought it while doing full justice to their achievement in creating an army—and a nation—out of chaos.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

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