Overview Of Nathaniel Philbrick's Bunker Hill

In Nathaniel Philbrick’s Bunker Hill: A City, A Siege, A Revolution, he writes to showcase a few points about The Revolutionary War. Throughout the various levels of schooling in America, The Revolution is taught and the most important facts, figures and events are to be learned. Philbrick writes to show a slightly different light of the revolution and focus on how important The City of Boston and its great inhabitants were to the success and even the start of the Revolution and the founding of The United States of America.

The book intends to showcase that without the City of Boston and its inhabitants, the war would not have kicked off and America would arguably still be apart of the British Commonwealth. Philbrook also wants to showcase

Bunker Hill: A City, A Siege, A Revolution is his first foray into The Revolutionary war, his other books were mostly maritime novels set around the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however this does not impact the book at all due to his intense and thorough research. He didn't want to learn just the facts of the time, he wanted to see how the people interacted with one another and how they reacted after each event that pushed the colonies closer and closer to revolution. After three years we are left with a great book and a extremely well researched one at that. Footnotes are not included throughout the book, which helps the book keep its flow and prevent it from becoming just another textbook. However at the end, pages of Philbrick's sources are shown and he uses a notes section to explain the use of his sources . He uses both primary and secondary sources to great effect. The reader gets letters, journals and firsthand accounts to see what happened and how they affected the people of the time. The book starts with a firsthand account of the Battle of Bunker Hill from John Quincy Adams, Philbrick was able to obtain a letter from Abigail Adams to her husband John Adams and retold the battle through the eyes of their seven year old boy. Philbrick even went so far as to visit the hill where John Quincy Adams viewed the battle in order to

The preface starts the book and sets up the time period and briefly explains how Philbrick researched and what he intends to get out of the book. The first part of the book is dedicated to how various conflicts and actions led to the Battle of Bunker Hill. The first chapter starts with the night of the Boston Tea Party where colonists threw tea in the harbor to protest the taxes imposed by Britain. Instead of jumping right in and leading the reader directly to the battles and siege, Philbrick takes the reader back to the French and Indian war, where the colonies had amassed a rather large debt. In order to get the Colonies to pay back the war debt, various acts were passed that taxed the people in various ways. One can begin to see the anger building in the colonies, for now conflict has not led to war but the colonies are rapidly moving towards it. After the Boston Tea Party, Britain responded with a blockade of Boston and regiments of British Regulars sent to the city. Eventually British force lead to parliament declaring that Massachusetts was rebelling, in response more British regulars were sent in and marched to Lexington and Concord kicking off the first battles of the war. The next few chapters are dedicated to the Battle of Bunker Hill. Instead of the normal tactics discussions in history textbooks,