This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice.
A tailor said to have saved George Washington's life twice. A spy ring famous for a clothesline that appears in none of its surviving letters. A soldier who served seventeen months under a man's name. A poet who wrote to the commander of the American army, and got an answer.
Every one of them is real. Some of what is said about them is not.
Untold Stories of the American Revolution gathers twenty-five true stories of the spies, women, outsiders and ordinary people whose lives ran through the war for independence, and it separates what the record shows from what legend added.
Inside, you'll meet:
The Long Island farmers, tavern keeper and whaleboat captain who carried a spy's letters across the Sound in invisible ink, and the code number that turned into 'Agent 355'
Hercules Mulligan, the New York tailor whose spy stories rest on a footnote printed fifty-five years later, and the one wartime letter that names him
Deborah Sampson, who enlisted in disguise in 1782 and was never at Yorktown, whatever the legends say
Phillis Wheatley, free for two years when she sent her poem to George Washington, and the reply he wrote
A one-man submarine, a burned customs ship, a smallpox gamble and the prison ships of New York Harbor
Why it reads differently:
Twenty-five stand-alone chapters, each about ten minutes long. Start anywhere.
Real people, real dates, no invented dialogue.
Every story shows where the evidence is strong, where it is thin, and where it turns to folklore.
Five themed parts: spies and secret keepers, women of the Revolution, outsiders and allies, the strange and the desperate, and ordinary people at the war's end.
Perfect for readers who like narrative history with the myths checked, book clubs, gift-givers, and anyone who has ever wondered whether a famous story is actually true.
Scroll up and start with any chapter.
Elias R. Thornbury writes narrative history about the people the textbooks skip. This is his first book.