Notices of The Road to Concord, Old and New

Back in 2017, the Writer’s Bone website featured a very complimentary review of The Road to Concord by site co-founder Daniel Ford.

I thought I’d boasted about that, but I must have been more modest than usual. So I’m going to resurrect it now:

Daniel: J.L. Bell is a Massachusetts writer who runs the terrific history blog, “Boston 1775.” His book, The Road to Concord: How Four Stolen Cannon Ignited the Revolutionary War, features everything that makes Bell’s site great: accessible writing style, innovative historical storytelling, and a fresh perspective on events that occurred nearly two-and-a-half centuries ago.

The Road to Concord focuses on how four stolen cannons (that British general Thomas Gage was desperately, and perhaps foolishly, trying to recover) may have helped spark the American Revolution. The narrative features colonial hijinks, high political drama, and Revolutionary War heroes not often discussed alongside Washington, Adams, and Jefferson. The Road to Concord is refreshingly original and structured like a thriller. Learning about what led the British and the colonies to war has never been this much fun.

Since Ford is a fiction writer, I was especially pleased by hius remarks on the book’s narrative structure.

In addition, folks have been emailing me that an episode of History’s Greatest Mysteries released this month on the History Channel discusses The Road to Concord. I’m too confused by the state of television today to find the full episode, though.