Description
The hard winter of 1777, when the Continental Army was camped at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, was a turning point in the Revolution, the moment when new drills and regulations turned a ragtag collection of ill-supplied amateurs into a professional fighting force capable of winning a war. Richard Bell tells this important story from the perspective of Baron Friedrich von Steuben, the Prussian immigrant with the unusual home life whom Washington tasked with achieving that critical transformation.
Richard Bell is a professor of history at the University of Maryland. He is the author of the new book Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home. He is the recipient of more than a dozen teaching awards and the National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Award. He is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.