Frederika Charlotte Louise von Massow was about thirteen when she first met Friedrich Riedesel, a dashing twenty-one-year-old cavalry officer and aide to the Duke of Brunswick.[1] Known to her family as Charlotte, she was born on July 11, 1746, at Brandenburg in northeastern Germany. The beautiful daughter of a lieutenant-general who was the commissary in chief for King Frederick II of Prussia, Charlotte as a child had followed her father on military campaigns in central Europe.
George Washington excepted, no one contributed as much to the British victory in the French and Indian War and to the American victory in the War for Independence as the New Hampshire frontiersman John Stark.
“I will either set my country free or shed my last drop of blood to make her so.” Joseph Warren, a prominent architect of the colonial rebellion, combined the eloquence of Thomas Jefferson with the leadership abilities of George Washington.
During her lifetime, the New York World described Kate Field as the “brainiest woman in the United States.” Born in St. Louis in 1838 (the same year as Henry Adams), she was the daughter of two well-known actors.
The snowy New Year’s morning of 1776 held little hope for the troops of the various American colonies huddled outside Quebec. Their attack upon the British citadel the previous night had failed.
None of the hardy individuals who populated early Vermont was more passionate about liberty than the frontier philosopher from the hill country of western Connecticut named Ethan Allen.
Henry Brooks Adams’s life and work traced the early political and social forces of a nation in whose making the Champlain Valley played a critical role.
William Henry Harrison Murray, a prominent clergyman at the historic Park Street Church in Boston, wrote Adventures in the Wilderness in the spring of 1869 to introduce city-dwellers to the rewards of camping in the wilderness.
With 13,000 British and German troops under General Sir Guy Carleton waiting to move south from Canada and a badly outnumbered army at Fort Ticonderoga and Mount Independence serving as the rebels’ northern line of defense, naval dominance on the lake was a major goal.
