American Political History
The full story of this country, told through the people who lived it. From the soldier in the mud to the statesman at the table. Chronological, self-contained seasons, built on the primary sources. New episodes Tuesdays and Thursday.
American Political History
The Glorious Cause - An Army from Nothing
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In July 1775, George Washington rode into Cambridge to take command of the army that would win American independence, and found that the army did not exist. What he had instead was a great armed crowd of New England militia, brave but undisciplined, filthy, dissolving, and, as he would discover a month later, almost entirely out of gunpowder.
This is the story of how the Continental Army was built from nothing, and how close it came, again and again, to never being built at all. Washington keeps a terrifying secret about his empty magazines. Disease kills nine men for every one the British shoot. And in the dead of winter, with the enemy a few hundred yards away, the entire army’s enlistments run out at once, forcing him to disband one army and recruit another within musket shot of the finest soldiers in the world.
It is the unglamorous truth under all the famous battles: a revolution held together not by genius, but by a refusal to quit.