Archaeology helps historians better understand the people of the past. In her book, Digging in the City of Brotherly Love, Rebecca Yamin uses archaeological investigations to look at Philadelphians between the 17th and 19th centuries. While she does mention prominent historical figures, she focuses on the forgotten. Through these excavations, archaeologists enhance what the written record tells us. Who knew so much could be learned by going through someone’s trash?

Daily service consumed most of a soldier's material life. Uniforms rarely lasted, equipment was worn out, lost, or stolen, and much of what does survive tends to be from officers. It can be difficult to find the common, everyday things they wore or carried.

​The recent popularity of the AMC show Turn has increased awareness of the little-known spy networks that helped Washington defeat British forces during the Revolutionary War. John Nagy’s 2010 book Invisible Ink: Spycraft of the American Revolution proves that truth is often stranger than fiction, perhaps particularly when it comes to spying. A product of Nagy’s decades of searching for clues to the identities and methods of American and British covert operatives during the war, relying heavily on the under-utilized British Army papers of General Henry Clinton, Nagy’s work unveils the identity of many formerly un-acknowledged patriots and numerous crypto-loyalists. His tale includes dozens of little known spies from all walks of life - not only soldiers and officers, but women, children, enslaved people, and ordinary craftsmen those who could blend easily into crowds and appear harmless to military officers on both sides, but whose quiet operations proved crucial.

Colonial Americans redefined the limits of their right to speak and write, which they inherited from Great Britain. In Revolutionary Dissent: How the Founding Generation Created the Freedom of Speech, Stephen D. Solomon explores how Americans from the 1690s through the 1790s deployed their technology and communication networks to expand participation in political discussions. To do this, he explores the role of almost every form of colonial communication, including books, newspapers, pamphlets, broadsides, songs, sermons, plays, letters, and many others which inspired and supported the Revolution.

Solomon also takes an inclusive view of what constitutes speech. In Chapter 4, entitled, “The Shoemaker,” as he is talking about the Stamp Act protests, Solomon discusses the importance of symbols as sometimes more potent and broadly accessible than the written word.

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.