Reporting on Reporting the Revolutionary War

National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition just reported on Reporting the Revolutionary War, the new journalism-based overview of the Revolution assembled by Todd Andrlik of Rag Linen. From that story:

There’s a lot more in those old newspapers than in your high school and college textbooks, he adds. “The Boston Tea Party, it was not universally celebrated in America. The ‘Shot Heard Round the World,’ well, it came very close to happening four months earlier, in New Hampshire. Benedict Arnold, he actually revitalized the American Revolution. The fact that Paul Revere was one of thousands of people caught up in the Battles of Lexington and Concord, and that he really wasn’t mentioned in the newspapers of the period because they didn’t want to let out how they had alerted the countryside.”

I’ll proudly add that it’s one of my two essays in this book that points out how Revere didn’t make the news in 1775.

Here’s an Associated Press dispatch on the book, courtesy of the Wall Street Journal, and Kirkus’s review of Reporting the Revolutionary War. I understand that Barnes & Noble will have its special edition on sale through today, and Amazon can match the price but not the extras.

Which brings me to Sunday, 2 December. At 5:30, Prof. Robert J. Allison of Suffolk University and I will join Todd for a panel discussion about the book at the Old State House in Boston. Earlier that day, at 2:00 P.M., Todd will sign books at the Harvard Coop. For more signings and talks, see the book’s events page.