If you visit the United States Capitol Building and stand in its massive rotunda, you will be surrounded by eight historical paintings. Connecticut-born artist and Revolutionary War veteran John Trumbull painted four of them. Trumbull’s paintings depict triumphant moments from the American Revolution, from the presentation of the Declaration of Independence in the Pennsylvania State House to the British surrender at Yorktown.

In his book Eyewitness Images from the American Revolution, Arthur S. Lefkowitz has gathered over 50 paintings, drawings, and engravings by soldiers, sailors, officers and artists who worked from first-hand knowledge of the events. Richly illustrated with many rarely-reproduced works of art, Eyewitness Images also tells the stories of the artists behind the works, introducing many less-celebrated figures of the war and revealing some of their methods for creating art amidst the dangers of war.

Russell Shorto’s Revolution Song: A Story of American Freedom weaves together the life stories of six historical figures against the backdrop of the American Revolution. Through their own words, recorded in diaries, letters, and autobiographies, an intimate portrait of each of these characters emerges as the author takes the reader on a journey across borders and decades. Along the way, their stories sometimes intertwine, but the author’s goal is to examine what freedom, or more specifically individual freedom, means to six very different people.

The American Revolution was the first of a series of world-shaking democratic revolutions that swept the Atlantic World in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Radical ideas of self-government, liberty, and republicanism challenged the Old World institutions of monarchy, aristocracy, and religious authority, transforming the modern world. In a sweeping work of intellectual history, Jonathan Israel investigates this global spread of enlightenment ideas in The Expanding Blaze: How the American Revolution Ignited the World, 1775-1848.

Deborah Sampson joined the Continental Army in the Fourth Massachusetts Regiment at the age of 21 disguised as a man. Enlisted as Robert Shurtliff, Sampson participated in numerous skirmishes from 1782-1783 in New York's Lower Hudson River Valley. After an illness, her secret was discovered and Sampson received an honorable discharge at West Point in 1763. Later in life, she received a pension for her military service and went on a national tour giving speeches about her wartime experiences and demonstrations of the manual of arms.

In the eighteenth century, love letters were not always meant for your lover's eyes only. Rather public expressions of love and affection were common during a courtship. We learn in this week's featured excerpt, that as courting men and women navigated a romantic relationship, they were also in a delicate negotiation of power.

In a 1793 letter to Angelica Schuyler Church in 1793, Thomas Jefferson described himself as "the most blessed of the patriarchs," a revealing sentiment that provides a window into the mindset of one of America's most famous founding fathers.

As a republican patriot and plantation patriarch, the contradictions of Thomas Jefferson's private and public worlds continue to fascinate and confound. Two of the leading scholars of Thomas Jefferson, Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter S. Onuf, collaborated to produce an insightful study of how Jefferson understood himself and his life's work as a revolutionary, politician, president, and slaveholder. 'Most Blessed of the Patriarchs': Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination, offers readers an intimate and provocative exploration of Thomas Jefferson's progression through life.

When eleven-year-old Nathaniel Fox runs away from his cruel uncle, he finds himself alone in New York City in the middle of the Revolutionary War! Young Nate soon meets an old friend and joins up with a Connecticut regiment as a camp helper. As he settles into camp life, chopping wood, digging trenches, and hauling water for the Continental Army, Nate learns more about the Revolutionary War, the Declaration of Independence, and, of course, hears stories about the feared Hessian soldiers and their deadly bayonets. Yet, Nate's courage will soon be tested as he and the Continental Army prepare for the Battle of Brooklyn.

At the outset of the Revolutionary War, the differences between the thirteen American colonies seemed insurmountable and the likelihood of them uniting together to defeat a global superpower appeared to be impossible. The leaders of the Revolutionary movement recognized that they would need a ‘common cause’ to unify the people politically. In The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution, Robert G. Parkinson explores the creation and propagation of a ‘common cause,’ crafted by Patriot leaders, to rally colonists from South Carolina to Massachusetts against a common enemy.

From the insignia on a soldier’s coat buttons to the shape of their cap, Don Troiani’s Soldiers of the American Revolution brings to the life the soldiers and battles of the Revolutionary War. Surviving objects and primary source descriptions of the uniforms, weapons, and accessories of the Revolutionary War serve as Troiani’s source material for his full-color illustrations of British, American, Oneida, and Hessian soldiers presented in various poses and scenes. A historical artist specializing in military paintings of the American Revolution and the Civil War, Troiana shows his work by featuring his original paintings of soldiers alongside the actual objects he studied in his artistic recreations.