6 September 1781 In the late eighteenth century, New London was a small port at the mouth of the river Thames on the Connecticut coast connecting American agricultural communities with the outside world. During the American Revolutionary War, the rebels used it as a base to attack British naval vessels and their supply ships, but…
28 September 1778 During the American Revolutionary War, many British officers did not consider those ‘damn’d American rebels’, as they called recruits of George Washington’s Continental Army, to be entitled to the rights normally accorded to combatants in conflict. Major General Charles Grey was among those more committed to unforgiving cutthroat tactics, leading operations in…
10 August 1781 During the American Revolutionary War, the British kept so many captive rebels in New York that it became a virtual city of prisons. Thousands were confined in squalid conditions and with little to eat, in makeshift jails converted from old sugar refineries, churches and warehouses. Captured officers were sometimes able to purchase…
7 July 1763 In 1763, Major General Jeffrey Amherst, was the highly respected governor general of British North America and commander-in-chief of British forces. In 1760, he had led the successful campaign to drive the French from North America and now he was infuriated when Native Americans challenged the new British hegemony, by resisting the…
26 June 1777 During the American Revolution, British troops ransacked and pillaged hundreds of American communities, but there was rarely any attempt to accurately account for what was taken. One exception is the ransacking of Westfield, when 13,000 Redcoats camped outside the small New Jersey town on the night of 26 June 1777. They marched…
17 OCTOBER 1775 On 6 October 1775, a squadron of Royal Naval ships, commanded by Captain Henry Mowat, sailed from Boston. Vice Admiral Samuel Graves ordered Mowat to discipline coastal towns deemed sympathetic to the American Revolutionary cause, which earlier that year had erupted into a full scale war against the tyranny of British colonial…
5 March 1770 The anniversary is commemorated every year with an annual reenactment in Boston, Massachusetts, but is virtually forgotten in Britain. During the early evening of Monday 5 March 1770, several Redcoats had been seen ‘parading the streets (of the colonial port) with their drawn cutlasses and bayonets, abusing and wounding numbers of the…
14 December 1950 On 14 December 1950, Prime Minister Clement Attlee had just returned from a meeting in Washington, DC, with President Truman. Attlee claimed in the House of Commons that he had ‘received assurances’ which he considered to be ‘perfectly satisfactory’ over the use of American military bases in the United Kingdom.1 He had been under…
14 October 1781 In October 1781, the British army at Yorktown in Virginia was besieged by American rebels and French troops and rapidly running out of supplies. Lord Cornwallis, commanding the garrison, was concerned that his white British soldiers and Hessian mercenaries should have enough to eat, so on Sunday 14 October he gave orders…
24 August 1814 On 24 August 1814, British troops burned down much of Washington D.C., including the White House, the Capitol, the bridge over the Potomac, the United States Treasury and other government and private properties. The resulting inferno, accelerated by the invaluable collection of books in the heavily timbered Library of Congress, was so vast that…
