Forgotten Heroes: Twenty-Six People Who Helped Win the American Revolution (Friends of Liberty Book 3)

Beautifully illustrated with original watercolor portraits of all twenty-six heroes.The American Revolution you learned in school had a familiar cast: Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Adams. Their stories are important. They are not the whole story.Forgotten Heroes: Twenty-Six People Who Helped Win the American Revolution recovers twenty-six extraordinary people who helped win American independence — and were left out of the history books anyway. They include a Welsh minister whose pamphlet outsold almost everything published in eighteenth-century Britain. A French playwright who ran one of history's most audacious covert arms operations. Two Polish engineers who built the fortifications that won the war's turning point and protected its most critical position. An enslaved man who penetrated British headquarters as a double agent while remaining the legal property of another man. A Quaker housewife who pressed her ear to a door in occupied Philadelphia and saved Washington's army from destruction. A shoemaker who infiltrated Loyalist networks in Westchester County and became the model for the hero of the first great American novel.These twenty-six people came from Wales and Poland, from France and Spain, from Ireland, Virginia, Massachusetts, and New Jersey. They were ministers and playwrights, engineers and shoemakers, painters and soldiers and spies. Several were women. Several were Black — some free, some enslaved. Several were immigrants. Most of them risked everything. None of them made it into the version of the Revolution that most Americans know.Organized in five phases that follow the arc of the war — from the parliamentary debates that preceded the first shots, through the long struggle and the turning of the tide, to the peace negotiations and the work of commemoration — Forgotten Heroes tells the Revolution's full story. Each chapter opens with a dramatic moment, delivers the biographical context that explains why it matters, and closes with a clear-eyed assessment of what these forgotten figures actually contributed and what they were owed in return.The result is a Revolution more diverse, more international, more morally complicated, and more genuinely inspiring than the familiar version. A Revolution won not by a handful of famous men but by an astonishing variety of people who looked at what was happening and decided it mattered enough to act.Published in April 2026 to coincide with the 250th anniversary of American independence, and illustrated throughout with original watercolor portraits by the author, Forgotten Heroes is the essential companion to the anniversary — the book that tells the rest of the story. Read more