“Yeah I’ll invade England, whatever, I do what I want, you ain’t the boss of me.”

~John Paul Jones

Considering that we wouldn’t have ended up becoming a country if the end result had gone a different way, it’s surprising how little about the Revolutionary War the average American is aware of.  We know about the Declaration of Independence, and Concord and Lexington at the start of things.  We know Bunker Hill.  We know that Benedict Arnold was an asshole, and that Nathanael Greene was a badass, and that Yorktown pretty much sealed the whole deal for us.  But apart from the founding fathers, and some iconic imagery of George Washington, when we think of the American Revolution we think of the early battles up until, say, Saratoga…and then, us eventually winning.

There were four years of war between Saratoga and Yorktown, and in general our history books kind of gloss over that period.  Pretty much the only people talking about that time period were, say, the screenwriters for The Patriot, and even with that you’d not immediately recall that the climax of that movie was 1781’s Battle of Cowpens.  We bring this up not to shame our history teachers—we get it, there’s a lot of important stuff to get through, and you might as well focus on the greatest hits—but rather to remind America that there was a lot of badassery going down in the American Revolution that gets swept under the rug.  We’re here to lift up that rug and show you those awesome, awesome dustballs.

Let’s talk about the time America invaded England.

The 1778 American Invasion of Whitehaven, England

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