Search results for ""author julie flavell""

In December 1774, Benjamin Franklin met Caroline Howe, the sister of British Admiral Richard and General William Howe, in a London drawing room for “half a dozen Games of Chess”. As Julie Flavell reveals, the games concealed a matter of the utmost diplomatic urgency, a last-ditch attempt to forestall the outbreak of war. Aware that the Howes, both the men and the women, have seemed impenetrable to historians, Flavell investigated the letters of Caroline Howe, which have been overlooked for centuries. Using these revelatory documents, Flavell provides a compelling reinterpretation of England’s famous family across four wars, centring on their enigmatic roles in the American Revolution. The Howe Dynasty interweaves action-packed stories of North American military campaigns—including the Battles of Bunker Hill and Long Island—with parlour-room intrigues back in England, creating a riveting narrative that brings alive the influence of these extraordinary women in both peacetime and war.

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In the years before independence, the famous city’s heyday as a beacon for colonial Americans “Ambitious . . . lively. . . . Beautifully reimagining a city that was a distant but integral part of American life, Flavell’s book is essential reading for anyone interested in the colonial period.”—Andrea Wulf, New York Times Book Review Benjamin Franklin secretly loved London more than Philadelphia: it was simply the most exciting place to be in the British Empire. And in the decade before the outbreak of the American Revolution, thousands of his fellow colonists flocked to the Georgian city in its first big wave of American visitors. At the very point of political rupture, mother country and colonies were socially and culturally closer than ever before. In this first-ever portrait of eighteenth-century London as the capital of America, Julie M. Flavell re-creates the famous city’s heyday as the center of an empire that encompassed North America and the West Indies. The momentous years before independence saw more colonial Americans than ever in London’s streets: wealthy Southern plantation owners in quest of culture, enslaved people hoping for a chance of freedom, Yankee businessmen looking for opportunities, even Ben Franklin seeking a second, more distinguished career. The stories of the colonials, no innocents abroad, vividly re-create a time when Americans saw London as their own and remind us of the complex, multiracial—at times even decadent—nature of America’s colonial British heritage.

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