Saratoga

Everyone knows Benedict Arnold as a traitor. Fewer people know what he was before that.He was the finest combat soldier in the Continental Army. He was the man who won the most important battles of the most important campaign of the Revolutionary War. He was wounded doing it. He received almost none of the credit for it. And the way that story ended - with a meeting in the dark, papers hidden in a boot, and a flight to a British warship - was not a departure from his character. It was an expression of it.The Battle of Saratoga in the autumn of 1777 is one of the most consequential military campaigns in American history, and one of the least understood. Most people know that Yorktown won the Revolution. What most people don't know is that Yorktown was only possible because of what happened in the forests of upstate New York two years earlier. Without Saratoga, there is no French alliance. Without the French alliance, there is no Yorktown. Without Yorktown, there is no independence.In The Battle of Saratoga: Seven Things You Should Know, the latest volume in the I'm No Expert, But series, writer Jim Stovall cuts through the mythology to tell the real story of the campaign that changed the war - the fatally flawed British plan, the trap that closed before the fighting even started, the militia soldiers and forgotten generals who did the essential work, the political maneuvering that robbed the real hero of his credit, and the long chain of grievance that turned the Revolution's most brilliant soldier into its most infamous traitor.Readable in about forty minutes. Accurate to the last detail. The story you thought you knew is considerably more complicated - and more interesting - than you realized.Curious, a little lost, and taking notes.