You've Never Learned the Revolution Like This

Art by Beck & Stone

You’ve Never Learned the Revolution Like This

If American history matters to you, you should be reading this series.

March 5, 2026

Author’s Note: This is an excerpt from my weekly Top of Mind newsletter, which goes out to subscribers every Thursday. Sign up to receive it directly in your inbox.

Most weeks, this newsletter is about higher education—something that exposes the degeneracy of our so-called educational institutions. But today, I want to turn your attention to our series, The Road to the American Revolution.

The series is an initiative of the National Association of Scholars. I manage it alongside Minding the Campus (MTC). It started on the MTC website, but as the project grew, it needed a home of its own. Now it lives on Substack, where the full collection of essays tracks the events leading up to the Declaration of Independence (and may include events after, so stay tuned!).

With the 250th anniversary only a few months away, now is the right time to start reading so you can argue effectively with your curmudgeon uncle at this year’s Fourth of July barbecue.

March 1776 is turning out to be an important month in the story. We’ve published two essays this month, with another on the way.

Earlier this week, I wrote about the colonial naval raid on Nassau—what we now know as the American Marines’ first amphibious landing. Colonial forces seized two forts and captured artillery that the Revolution desperately needed. The operation was both bold and flawed.

This morning, I published Keith Whitaker’s essay on George Washington’s decision to fortify Dorchester Heights. For months, the British occupied Boston while colonial forces surrounded them. Then Washington hauled artillery from Ticonderoga and fortified the heights under cover of darkness. When the British awoke on March 5 and saw American guns above the harbor, they knew the city was lost.

Rather than recounting a few famous dates, we are telling the story of the Revolution chronologically—occasionally stepping back when the narrative requires it—showing how it unfolded through gambles, logistical improvisation, and moments when the outcome was anything but certain.

If American history matters to you, you should be reading it.

Follow Jared Gould on X.

Discussion

Dr. Ed

March 6, 2026

A couple of points. First, as to Bermuda, while details vary, about 100 barrels of gunpowder had already walked out out of the bunker the summer of 1775, roll down the hill and onto either one or two ships who then reportedly transported it to the colonial cause.

Second, it’s not that Boston was surrounded as much as that it was an island. The Boston neck was only 100-120 feet wide at high tide, and had a gate that was traditionally closed at night. The British literally dug a moat as well.

Now at low tide, there were mud flats, silky mud that appears to resemble quicksand, the notations I’ve seen is it was not possible to walk through it — both sides consider it considered it impassable ground, so one accessed Boston either via this narrow land bridge to Roxbury, or by boat to either Cambridge or Charlestown.

The thing to remember, is it this was all a tidal estuary, the mud flats adjacent to the Boston neck became the south end, back bay was a bay, initially bridged by a railroad causeway that essentially is I-90 today, and the Charles River stretched from the Lechmere MBTA station to Bunker Hill Community College.

The college is on the site of the old Massachusetts state prison, which was built on a point that stuck out into the river so to preclude prisoner escapes. Everything in the middle, essentially everything under the double deck portion of I 93, was the river and filled in by the Boston & Maine Railroad for its yard.

Hence the rivers served as a natural barrier between Boston and Cambridge, with Loyalists fleeing to Boston and Patriots fleeing from Boston. The only border that actually had to be defended was 100–110 feet of the Boston neck and the approach to that was so open that it was impossible to approach the British line without being seen.

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