Everyone thinks Benjamin Franklin drew "Join, or Die" for the Revolution. He drew it twenty-two years early — and he drew it to help the British. It appeared in his Pennsylvania Gazette on May 9, 1754: a snake cut...

Washington's own men shot each other in the fog — and it helped win the war. On October 4, 1777, eleven thousand Americans marched all night to surprise nine thousand British outside Philadelphia. Washington's plan called for four columns...

Benjamin Franklin spent sixteen years in London trying to prevent the Revolution — then they put him in a room and tore him apart. By 1774 he was sixty-eight and the most famous American alive, serving as colonial agent...

Martha Washington burned almost every letter she and George ever wrote each other — forty-one years of marriage. He died at Mount Vernon in December 1799. She closed their bedroom and never slept in it again, and before her...