Welcome to Lit Trivia, the Book Review’s regular quiz about books, authors and literary culture. In honor of Gen. George Washington’s birthday on Feb. 22, this week’s super-size challenge is focused on the literature and history related to the American Revolution. In the 10 multiple-choice questions below, tap or click on the answer you think is correct. After the last question, you’ll find links to exhibits, books and other materials related to this intense chapter in the country’s story, including an award-winning biography of the general and first U.S. president.
New book explores Thomas Paine’s legacy – CBS News
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A new book is reexamining the legacy of American revolutionary Thomas Paine, best known for his work “Common Sense.” Author and Harvard University professor Danielle Allen joins CBS News to discuss.
Celebrating 250 years since the Declaration of Independence, leaders in Suffolk County have released a new guide to the area’s historic sites. The guide gives Long Islanders and visitors a roadmap to explore local landmarks – and is designed to boost tourism in the process.
“Long Island’s Path to Independence: A Revolutionary Historical Passport” is published by the Suffolk County 250 Commemorative Planning Committee. The book encourages public engagement with Long Island’s Revolutionary War history and was developed by local historical societies, museums, and community institutions. The guide includes QR codes for each participating organization’s website, and features space to collect commemorative stamps from each site visited.
“This book – sold at cost – is a field guide to the history of Suffolk County, a history that goes all the way back to this being the first English-speaking settlement in what is now New York,” Suffolk County Executive Ed Romaine said in a news release about the guide.
The book’s release comes at a time of strong tourism that has been reported for the region. In 2024, Long Island tourism reached record highs, with $7.9 billion in spending, up 3.8 percent from the previous year, according to New York State’s annual tourism economic impact report.
Tourism jobs also increased, with 78,418 jobs in 2024, up from 76,227 in 2023.
The recently published passport book highlights sites such as locations tied to the Culper Spy Ring, a former tavern, and The Country House Restaurant – a dining destination built in 1710 with a storied past.
Along with the passport book are a free mobile app that will soon feature audio files of all the historic sites around the county. Events and promotions celebrating the anniversary will also be posted on Suffolk250.org.
To dispel the idea that the American Revolution refers only to a war, we’re going to start our look at Ken Burns’ latest epic, “The American Revolution,” at the end, after the war is won.
In a 1787 address, founding father Benjamin Rush said, “The American war is over: but this is far from being the case with the American Revolution. On the contrary, nothing but the first act of the great drama is closed. It remains yet to establish and perfect our new forms of government.”
Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns.
CBS News
“It’s all up to us to take whatever has been done and try to make what we can of it,” said Burns. “I mean, let’s just back up. This is, I think, the most important event since the birth of Christ, the creation of the United States of America, with all of the violence, with all of the sturm and the drang of it, all of the extraordinary people, not just the familiar bold-face names, but the bottom-up people who did the fighting and dying.
“It’s kind of a sun, you know, it has a kind of energy to it,” he said. “And that’s why I get so animated about the revolution, because you just realize, that was it, the kind of moment of creation.”
If the 72-year-old Burns sometimes gets a little animated himself, it’s because he’s devoted his career to animating – breathing life into our shared past, in such documentaries as “The Civil War,” “Baseball,” and “Jazz.” By now, the cinematic trappings of a Burns film are familiar. But within even the most well-worn story, he always uncovers the unexpected. In his editing room, there is a sign reminding us: “It’s complicated.”
I asked, “Is that why history is important to study? It’s not to learn happy stories about the past, but to sit with complexity?”
“That’s the whole story,” Burns replied. “Harry Truman said, ‘The only thing that’s really new is the history you don’t know,’ which, I just love it. David McCullough told that to me, and I just think it’s really important. And he also said that doing good history means that you think that it might not turn out the way you know it did.”
Consider the film’s portrayal of George Washington. Historian Annette Gordon-Reed, who has written of the founders and their flaws and failings, says of Washington that we would not have had a country without him.
Gen. George Washington.
CBS News
“He’s a slave owner in a country that is now proclaiming universal rights and liberties,” said Burns. “And he recognizes that in order for this to be a successful venture, people in Georgia and people in Massachusetts are going to have to go, ‘Yes, we share some things in common,’ which they had never shared before. They were foreign countries. [Washington] seemed to be able to articulate, not just in words, but I would say in deeds and manner and atmosphere, how we were going to coalesce.”
Holding our past up to the unforgiving light of the present takes years, and an army of filmmakers, based largely in bucolic Walpole, New Hampshire.
Sarah Botstein has worked with Burns for almost 30 years. She, along with David Schmidt and Burns, co-directed “The American Revolution.” “We decided to make it in 2015, so it’s almost a decade since we decided to do it,” she said. “And for the better part of five or six years, this is really all I thought about.”
I asked, “What is it like to carry the revolution in your head for that long?”
“It’s an enormous responsibility, and an enormous privilege,” Botstein said.
Although the aesthetics of the film are thoroughly 18th century, the concerns of the 21st are never far from mind. The political and cultural tumult of the decade during which the film was made provide the context in which we, the viewers, will watch.
I asked Burns, “Is America in crisis?”
“Oh, I think it’s almost perpetuating crisis,” he replied. “We’ve been always disagreeing, and our revolution is the thing. I mean, this is the Civil War. In our film, not intentionally, but once we finish you go, ‘Oh, wow, there’s this admonition: don’t fall out, keep the union together.’ Maybe that has some inspirational possibilities in our own difficult times.”
As with all of Burns’ films, we desperately want to know: Can the stories of our past guide us through a future that has rarely felt so uncertain to so many?
Burns said, “The second sentence of the Declaration is the most important sentence, second most important sentence in the English language after ‘I love you.’ I mean, there’s nothing better than that sentence, and it says: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident.’ There is nothing self-evident about these truths! They’ve never been introduced in this way, quite this way before, that all men are created equal.
“And so, think about where we are right now and all the divisions that we have, how incredibly helpful coming back to this origin story could be.
“I mean, this is the kind of stuff that we look for, and that by finding our original narrative, reclaiming our original narrative, you have a chance to begin to heal those things, or at least remind people, ‘Oh yeah, I’m supposed to be listening to what the other person said. The other person who disagrees with me is not the enemy.’”
To watch a trailer for “The American Revolution,” click on the video player below.
Deep in the pine forests of South Carolina, the trees stretch endlessly across the horizon. To the untrained eye, it’s just another patch of wilderness. But beneath the sandy soil of Camden lies something sacred: the long-forgotten remains of Revolutionary War soldiers.
“I was completely blown away every time we found one,” said archaeologist Jim Legg. “It’s kind of stunning.”
The remains weren’t discovered by police detectives, but by South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology archeologists, Steve Smith and Legg, who had spent decades combing Camden’s historic battlefields for artifacts. What they found was more than history — it was humanity.
The Battle of Camden
On Aug. 16, 1780, Camden’s grounds witnessed one of the most brutal clashes of the American Revolution. The Continental Army, led by General Horatio Gates, faced off against British forces under General Lord Cornwallis. The result was devastating: nearly 2,000 American troops were killed, wounded, or captured.
“It was really brutal,” Legg explained. “All parties fought stubbornly and exchanged musket fire at close range. It was a disaster for the Americans.”
The Battle of Camden is mentioned in history books and even films like “The Patriot,” but the precise location of much of the fighting remained unclear until Legg and Smith began their archaeological survey in the 1990s. Years later, a simple uniform button led to an extraordinary discovery: a shallow grave containing five sets of human remains. Soon after, nine more were found nearby.
The evidence suggested these were hastily dug battlefield burials. Among them were Continental soldiers, a Scottish Highlander from the British side, and even a Native American fighter. Yet their identities were lost to time.
A Revolutionary War cold case
Today, Camden and its historic foundation are working to bring these forgotten soldiers back into the light. To do so, they’ve turned to an unexpected source: forensic genealogy.
“This is the ultimate cold case,” said President of FHD Forensics, Allison Peacock. “It belongs to the whole country.”
Peacock, who specializes in identifying unknown remains by combining DNA analysis with family tree research, was asked if it could be done on bones more than 240 years old. Her answer? Maybe.
So far, her team has built genetic profiles for two sets of remains, nicknamed 11A and 9B. Astonishingly, each profile shows more than 25,000 living genetic matches, far more than a typical unidentified remains case.
“In a typical John Doe case, I might get 3 or 4,000, 5,000 at the most,” Peacock said.
One soldier, 9B, has already revealed key details.
“He was a teenager,” said FHD Forensics Senior Investigative Genetic Genealogist Valerie Kemp. “We know for sure his family came from the Anne Arundel area.”
The team has narrowed the search to a handful of family names including Warfield, Griffith, and others, and is now asking possible descendants to submit their own DNA through the Revolutionary War Forensic Institute.
“My dream would be that a Warfield or a Griffith reaches out,” Peacock said. “We’ll send them a cheek swab and pay for it.”
Honoring the forgotten
In 2023, the city of Camden gathered to formally bury twelve of the discovered Continental soldiers with full military honors. For many, it was a moving reminder that America’s earliest soldiers should not be forgotten.
“These are the first Americans,” said Smith. “The first American soldiers.”
Yet their names remain unknown, and for Peacock, that work is far from finished.
“When you see someone getting the respect they deserve, that maybe they had been forgotten about, it matters,” she said. “These men were just left to the elements. Nobody knew their names. But we want to change that.”
The battle to restore their identities has just begun.
A new visitor center planned at New Jersey’s Washington Crossing State Park will include “commanding views” of the Delaware River at the site where the Revolutionary War took a pivotal turn.
The visitor center is expected to be completed in time for the nation’s 250th anniversary in 2026, according to the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection. Preparation work is starting this month.
The visitor center will feature a unique, curved design with a green roof and a series of trails surrounding the building. Inside, a multipurpose theater will have immersive exhibits that celebrate Gen. George Washington and his troops crossing the icy river into New Jersey on Christmas in 1776. The next morning, the Continental Army marched nine miles south to Trenton and waged a surprise attack on a garrison held by Hession mercenaries. British forces had largely remained in New York for the winter, leaving an opening for Washington’s army to score a strategic victory that restored morale and helped alter the course of the war in the Americans’ favor.
Washington Crossing State Park spans about 3,500 acres in Mercer and Hunterdon counties along the Delaware River, with most of the park’s amenities situated near the riverfront in Titusville. Before the war, the site of the crossing had been used for commercial and passenger ferries between Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
The park was established in 1912 and later expanded with roads, trails and picnic groves during the Great Depression. It now includes a nature preserve, an open-air theater and a number of historic structures, including the Johnson Ferry House and surrounding tract where Washington’s troops took shelter after crossing the river. The park’s Swan Collection, held at the existing visitor center, holds more than 600 artifacts from the Revolutionary War era.
The visitor center is expected to cost $14 million, the Inquirer reported.
It is being funded with corporate business tax revenue through the Preserve New Jersey Act. Additional support will be provided by Gov. Phil Murphy with funds from the American Rescue Plan. The visitor center was designed by New York-based Ikon 5 Architects, whose work received a national award from the Society of American Registered Architects.
Beginning in late February (2024), work will begin in preparation for construction of the new Washington Crossing State…
The initial phase of the project involves removing trees from the visitor center site. By law, the state will offset the tree removal with plantings in other areas of the park. Events marking the United States Semiquincentennial will begin later this year and continue through 2033, officials said.
Washington State Crossing Park is significantly bigger than Bucks County’s 500-acre Washington Crossing Historic Park, which holds annual Christmas reenactments of the famed crossing. In recent years, Pennsylvania has provided funding for the restoration of more than a dozen historic structures at the park.
President Joe Biden sat down with a “diverse” group of scholars and historians earlier this week to discuss the upcoming anniversary of the January 6th riots.
How diverse? White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre mentioned it repeatedly at a press briefing Thursday.
“He’s (Biden) met with historians before ahead of an important national moment, which we’re about to see, certainly, as it relates to January 6th,” she told reporters.
“And he met with these historians — a diverse group of historians to hear … directly from them on their thoughts about our democracy here in this country and abroad,” she added.
Jean-Pierre peppered in the word “diverse” three more times for good measure.
Over Half Of American Voters Either Think The FBI Was Involved In January 6th, Or Aren’t Sure
That diversity likely did not take into account those who do not believe the Capitol riot was on par with the Civil War.
As evidenced by one of those scholars, Sean Wilentz of Princeton, who told the Washington Post about his lunch with Biden and how January 6th reminded him of “what the secessionists were doing in 1860-61.”
“Go back and read what was going on in March 1861: They were worried about possibilities that pro-Confederates would enter the Capitol and actually disrupt the normal process of the succession of power,” Wilentz explained.
Nor does Biden’s meeting with historians take into account recent polling that shows that 25% of Americans believe FBI operatives organized and encouraged the January 6th attack on the Capitol.
Another 26% say there is enough doubt to make them “not sure” if the FBI participated in the events, while 48% believe that the idea that the FBI participated is either “probably” or “definitely” false.
The reason why 25% of Americans (including me) now believe the “conspiracy theory” that FBI instigated Jan 6 is the same reason why we believe that Covid was a man-made virus from China. It’s called reality. The MSM’s lack of self-awareness is astounding.https://t.co/cogkhf027j
Informants for the FBI were undoubtedly a part of the planning stages of the January 6th riot and others have made numerous claims to their activities that very day.
Steven Sund, the chief of the Capitol Police at the time of the January 6th riot, has suggested that the FBI had at least 18 undercover agents in the crowd along with an estimated 20 from the Department of Homeland Security.
Representative Clay Higgins (R-TX) has claimed that there may have been “over 200” undercover FBI agents posing as supporters of Donald Trump inside the Capitol before the riot on January 6th, 2021. Evidence of those numbers has yet to materialize.
Perhaps more alarming to Democrats is another recent poll that shows an increasing number of American voters believe the 2020 election was stolen.
A new Suffolk University poll indicates that two-thirds (67%) of Trump supporters don’t believe Biden was legitimately elected president in 2020.
This all depends on how the question was worded. While former President Trump’s claims of voter fraud have not panned out, there is ample evidence that the media and intelligence communities worked overtime to carry Biden to the White House.
President Biden, according to reports, plans to channel his inner George Washington in a speech commemorating January 6th, a day Democrats put on par with the attack on Pearl Harbor, 9/11, and obviously, the Revolutionary War.
Daily Mail reported that Biden “will speak near Valley Forge, where 250 years ago, the then-General Washington organized the alliance of colonial militias during a bleak winter and ‘united’ them to fight for democracy against the British in the Revolutionary War.”
“Biden will use the birthplace of the American army to accuse Trump of attempting to ‘dismantle and destroy our democracy’ by provoking his supporters to riot when he did not win reelection in 2020,” the publication added.
Aside from Democrats truly believing J6 is the equivalent of Pearl Harbor and 9/11, which is a clear sign of a mental disorder, the dude is literally going to channel the same guy his own party wants to cancel because they don’t understand how times change.… pic.twitter.com/k2ZU77kJGo
The left tries to rewrite history perpetually. They do so when it comes to George Washington, and they certainly have done so when it comes to January 6th.
Thank goodness for those scholars and historians. Oh wait, here’s Princeton scholar Sean Wilentz once again, suggesting that if Trump wins the 2024 presidential elections, he’ll get rid of all the real historians.
“I don’t even want to think about what historians are going to be saying if Trump wins,” Wilentz said. “I just hope there are historians around.”
Weird. Biden is meeting with historians to make sure they’re all on the same page regarding January 6th, not Trump.
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Rusty Weiss has been covering politics for over 15 years. His writings have appeared in the Daily Caller, Fox News, Breitbart, and many more.
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A man with a toy Revolutionary War-style flintlock pistol was arrested after he tried to pass himself off as a police officer at a Bronx train station, cops said Saturday.
Gilbert Melendez, 65, was standing outside the St. Lawrence Ave. No. 6 subway station near Westchester Ave. in Soundview about 1 p.m. Thursday when cops spotted a collapsible baton used by law enforcement hanging from his pants pocket.
When the officers stepped up to him and inquired about it, Melendez said he was a cop from “Washington City,” but had no credentials to prove that he was a police officer.
Cops searched Melendez, finding the fake flintlock pistol in a holster in his pocket. He also had three police shields — all fake.
“Don’t think the Bronx has seen a pistol like this since we fought the redcoats at Pell’s Point,” NYPD Transit Chief Michael Kemper tweeted Saturday, referring to the Oct. 1776 Bronx battle between the Continental Army and the British. “Nevertheless, this & an assortment of police ‘credentials’ & equipment is what Transit officers found on a man claiming to be a law enforcement official outside a Bronx subway station.”
Melendez was charged with weapons possession for the baton and for criminal impersonation.
He was released without bail following a brief arraignment at Bronx Criminal Court on Friday, according to court records.
