With Fire and Sword: The Battle of Bunker Hill and the Beginning of the American Revolution

On June 17, 1775, the entire dynamic of the newborn American Revolution was changed. If the Battle of Lexington and Concord was, in the immortal words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the "shot heard round the world," Bunker Hill was the volley that rocked Britain's Parliament and the ministry of King George III to its core. The Battle of Bunker Hill was the first hostile engagement of the Revolution between two organized armies, and the first time that a genuine American army had ever taken the field. It gave the British their first inkling that the Colonial rabble-in-arms they had envisioned might actually prove to be a formidable fighting force.

In this book, award-winning author James L. Nelson tells the exciting and dramatic story of the fight that changed the face of the American Revolution. He looks at the events leading up to that fateful day, the personalities on both the British and American sides who made momentous decisions, and the bloody outcome of those crucial choices, which would affect the British strategy on the battlefield throughout the six more years of active warfare.

A masterful new history of the first set-piece battle of the Revolutionary War, With Fire and Sword offers critical new insights into one of the most important actions of our country's founding.

James L. Nelson is the author of fifteen works of fiction and nonfiction. His novels include the five books of his Revolution at Sea saga and three in his Brethren of the Coast series. His novel Glory in the Name won the American Library Association's W. Y. Boyd Literary Award for Best Military Fiction. Reign of Iron: The Story of the First Battling Ironclads was his first work of nonfiction, and he has since authored three other histories of naval warfare during the American Revolution: Benedict Arnold's Navy, George Washington's Secret Navy, which earned the Samuel Eliot Morison Award from the Naval Order of the United States, and George Washington's Great Gamble. He lives in Harpswell, Maine, with his wife and four children.