An excellent book ...

Happy Birthday, Mulligan

Hercules Mulligan was born on this day in 1740.

Excellent.

An excellent book ...

Excellent.

An excellent book ...

Spies.

The Revolutionary War was not fought by proclamations and battles alone.  A major component of the war was the challenge of organizing military strategies over thousands of miles of battlefield.  From the very beginning of the war, a complex network of spies, double agents, and traitors began to emerge in an effort to learn the plans of the enemy before they were enacted.  The preservation and availability of the Sir Henry Clinton collection at the Clements Library provides an amazingly complete look at the everyday intelligence operations of both the British and American armies.  

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Unique.

In school, we all learned about Paul Revere and his famous April 18, 1775 ride through the Massachusetts countryside warning of an impending British armed force marching from Boston, MA to the small towns of Lexington and Concord. But, of course, there is much more to the story, including the British commander of all troops in North America, British spies, patriotic tavern keepers, an unsigned manuscript map, and a Boston publisher.

Tensions between the colonies and England reached a boiling point in December 1773 with the Boston Tea Party when a group of colonists dumped tea from England into Boston Harbor. As a result, the British Parliament passed a series of laws that, among other things, installed British General Thomas Gage, as the governor of the Colony of Massachusetts in May 1774. By the winter of 1774-1775, however, in the face of continued rebellious activities, General Gage argued for an 18th century troop “surge” – as many as 20,000 additional troops – to pacify the countryside.

Several years ago, I stumbled across an unsigned manuscript map with the supplied title of “Roxbury to Concord. Roads & distances, &c.” This unique map was acquired by the Library of Congress in 1867 as a part of the Peter Force Collection, which includes more than 750 Revolutionary era printed and manuscript maps transferred to the Geography and Map Division.

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X.

Before there was the CIA, there was the OSS, a top-secret spy agency hatched by Roosevelt and Churchill in the darkest hours of World War II. The goal: help Britain get back into occupied territory by building an army of highly trained super spies. Discover the origins of modern espionage at Camp X, the first secret agent training school in North America, and pore over the manual that served as its bible. Through declassified items and firsthand accounts, we reveal the untold stories behind the covert war in history's largest conflict.

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Thanks, Freiherr von Naarenburg

Own.

As an auxiliary spy, Hemingway more than once demonstrated willingness to take risks and work hard, but in the end, no matter what others had in mind for him, Hemingway made his own way through the war …

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