The whites of their eyes

Offers a reassessment of the first major engagement of the American Revolution by intertwining two equally important stories--the creation of America's first army and the rise of the man who led it, George Washington. One hot June afternoon in 1775, on the gentle slopes of a hill near Boston, Massachusetts, a small band of ordinary Americans--frightened but fiercely determined--dared to stand up to a superior British force. But the first real engagement of the American Revolution and one of the most famous battles in our history, Bunker Hill was not the battle that we have been taught to believe it was. Revisiting old evidence and drawing on new research, Lockhart shows that Bunker Hill was a clumsy engagement pitting one inexperienced army against another. Lockhart tells the rest of the story, too: how a mob of armed civilians became America's first army; how George Washington set aside his comfortable patrician life to take command of the veterans of Bunker Hill; and how the forgotten heroes of 1775--though overshadowed by the more famous Founding Fathers--kept the notion of American liberty alive.--From publisher description.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.