The French have a term for the feeling that naturally follows from reading recent newspaper headlines about Germany “reinventing” its economy around manufacturing weapons for Europe. The term is déjà vu, and it’s not just about the two world wars. Long before unifying into a nation, the German states of the Holy Roman Empire made a business of supplying their European neighbors with not just arms but also entire armies.

As April 1776 gave way to May, American patriots were discovering the specifics behind reports that King George III of Great Britain had outsourced some of his fight against them to foreign troops. Though hailing from several different German states, these soldiers would go into the history books under the shared name of “Hessians,” for the principality that furnished most of their numbers: Hesse-Kassel. The first of the approximately 30,000 who served in America during the Revolutionary War set off across the Atlantic around this time 250 years ago.

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On April 19, 1776—250 years ago this week—patriot leaders marked one year since the Revolutionary War had begun with the Battles of Lexington and Concord or, as the writer Ralph Waldo Emerson would later put it, “the shot heard round the world.” Across the Atlantic Ocean, no one had awaited the sound longer and more eagerly than the French.

In the usual telling of the Revolutionary War, the story of Franco-American relations revolves around Benjamin Franklin’s diplomatic mission to France and the Marquis de Lafayette’s quest to fight for liberty in America. But long before those two men crossed the Atlantic in opposite directions, a more secret history was being written by a French playwright named Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais. By the first anniversary of the war, he and his allies neared approval for one of the war’s greatest pieces of theater: a covert plan to aid the American rebels.

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For anyone who has ever experienced the embarrassment of sharing a news story and finding out only afterward that it was too good to be true, here’s some solace: John Adams could relate. In June 1819, he forwarded to fellow ex-president Thomas Jefferson a newspaper article claiming that Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, had declared independence from Great Britain on May 20, 1775, in terms strikingly similar to the ones Jefferson would use the next year when drafting the Declaration of Independence. Bitter that Jefferson had gotten “all the glory” for a document that Adams denigrated as a “theatrical show,” the New Englander relished evidence that the Virginian had stolen some of his most vaunted phrases, including “our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor,” from the Carolina backwoods.

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In 1859, Mary Custis Lee, the owner of the famed Arlington House in Virginia, published some letters by her late step-great-grandfather, George Washington. Not everyone approved of her editorial choices. Her husband, Colonel Robert E. Lee, believed she had erred by including correspondence showing that Washington had taken an ownership stake in a privateer vessel during the Revolutionary War. “I would prefer it had been omitted,” Lee wrote to Mary. “It may suit the mercantile taste of the East more than it does mine.”

Although it was too late for Mary to remove the offending letters, many chroniclers of the American Revolution have taken her husband’s advice and obscured the contributions of privateers. Perhaps the hesitancy to mention them is due to their being lumped in (usually unfairly) with pirates or perhaps to a discomfort with how these privately owned ships mixed patriotism with profits. With this week marking the 250th anniversary of the Continental Congress setting rules for privateering, it’s long past time to see these ships for what they were: the embodiment of the entrepreneurial spirit that would shape the new country.

In early 1776, the colonists learned that Parliament had passed a law forbidding trade with them and unleashing the world’s most powerful navy against their ships. Although the law would go into the history books as the Prohibitory Act, Continental Congress delegate John Adams favored calling it “an Act of Independency” because it broke any last ties that remained to the Mother Country. “It throws 13 colonies out of the royal protection . . . and makes us independent in spite of all our supplications and entreaties,” he wrote. “It may be fortunate that the Act of Independency should come from the British Parliament, rather than the American Congress.”

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They traveled by gunboat and foot instead of helicopter; gained entry by forging letters instead of breaching computer systems; donned disguises instead of night-vision goggles; and communicated with smoke signals and flags instead of livestream. Long before the operation to extract Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, a band of U.S. soldiers and their Filipino allies pulled off one of the most daring ruses in military history and captured the Philippine insurgent leader Emilio Aguinaldo. The 125th anniversary of the raid this week is a reminder that such missions require cunning and courage—and rarely come without controversy.

It was hardly obvious in 1898, when the Spanish-American War first brought U.S. forces to the Philippines (then a Spanish colony), that Aguinaldo would become America’s most-wanted man in the archipelago. Not yet 30 years old but already the head of the Philippine nationalist movement, Aguinaldo had hoped that the country famous for the Declaration of Independence would support a declaration of independence for the Philippines. When President William McKinley dashed those hopes by claiming the islands for the United States at the end of the war (there was reason to think the Germans or Japanese might have seized the islands otherwise), Aguinaldo shifted from fighting the Spanish to fighting the Americans.

With U.S. forces putting the squeeze on the nationalist army in late 1899, Aguinaldo turned to guerrilla tactics and dispersed his men. The bloody Philippine-American War would drag on as Aguinaldo disappeared into the mountainous northeast of the Philippines’ largest island, Luzon.

The breakthrough in the search for Aguinaldo came in January 1901 via the same means that would later lead Navy SEALs to Osama bin Laden: a courier. When a messenger carrying dispatches from Aguinaldo surrendered to American forces, Brigadier General Frederick Funston took personal charge of the questioning. A diminutive Kansan known for making big headlines (he had received the Medal of Honor for his actions during a battle in 1899), Funston would deny ever employing an interrogation technique known as the “water cure.” Whatever the truth, Funston gained two key pieces of information: that Aguinaldo resided in a village called Palanan by Luzon’s northeast coast, and that he was hoping to receive reinforcements there shortly.

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The loyalists in Boston had hoped the day would never come, but come it did on March 17, 1776, when the British evacuated the city after a nearly yearlong siege by patriot forces. There would be chaos and confusion, but no refugees left to swim after ships that had already sailed, no scenes as tragic as the ones that the country born out of the American Revolution would one day leave behind in Saigon and Kabul.

As we commemorate the birth of the United States, there’s no shame in admitting there are still lessons worth learning from the example the Mother Country set. Two hundred fifty years ago this week, the British showed how a great power can abandon a city without forsaking its friends.

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Judging by the recent Supreme Court decision on tariffs, James Madison, whose 275th birthday is March 16, remains as relevant as ever. His name appears in the decision almost two dozen times—in the opinions of both the justices who struck down President Donald Trump’s preferred method of imposing tariffs and those who would have upheld it.

During the winter of 1832–33, Americans had the good fortune of not having to guess which side the “Father of the Constitution” would take amid the so-called nullification crisis when South Carolina raised a very different challenge to the constitutionality of protective tariffs. Of all the Constitution’s signers, Madison was the only one still alive to give his opinion.

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The Fortress Washington Built Overnight

There was little sleep this night 250 years ago around Boston. The British troops occupying the city had heard rumors of a rebel movement but could not hear the procession of wagons, oxen, and soldiers over the roar of the artillery duel that the Continental Army had begun. Not until the sun rose over Boston Harbor the next morning did the British discover what the cannon fire and darkness had disguised: George Washington’s men had transformed the previously unoccupied Dorchester Heights across the water into a formidable bastion with the fortifications and firepower needed to force the British out of the city.

The operation on Dorchester Heights on the night of March 4, 1776, led to Washington’s first significant triumph of the Revolutionary War and previewed a secret weapon that regimes underestimating the United States have failed to reckon with time and time again: the ingenuity and enterprise of the American people.

By March, the siege that had begun with the British falling back into Boston from Concord and Lexington was nearing the one-year mark. As discussed here a few weeks ago, Washington felt his countrymen losing patience with the stalemate. The officers he convened in a war council in mid-February had rejected his plan to throw troops across the frozen water separating his army from the British but gave their support to an alternative plan: fortifying Dorchester Heights.

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Jefferson’s Words for a Fractured Country

By the election of 1800, the political parties that the Founding Fathers had hoped never to see had become impossible to ignore. Republicans (confusingly, the forerunner of the Democratic Party) accused Federalists of a conspiracy to transform the presidency into a monarchy, curtail freedom of speech, and menace immigrants. Federalists accused Republicans of seeking to render America lawless, defenseless, godless, and financially creditless.

Until recently, it was hard for historians trying to relay this history to explain how such apocalyptic-sounding accusations ever went mainstream. Now, anyone scrolling through social media has a decent sense. The timelier question is, how did our forebears move on after the experience? Two hundred twenty-five years ago this week, the winner of the presidential election, Republican Thomas Jefferson, went in search of words that could “restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty, and even life itself, are but dreary things.” That was how he described his goal with his first inaugural address, and it remains among the finest expressions of American values ever composed.

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Washington’s Civil War

A good reason for resisting the fad of referring to Washington’s Birthday as Presidents’ Day went unmentioned in last week’s newsletter but can be summed up here in two words: James Buchanan. On February 22, 1861, a crowd hoping to see soldiers march down Washington’s Pennsylvania Avenue in honor of the first president’s birthday instead saw the soon-to-be former president Buchanan come down with a case of cold feet. With an antislavery Republican named Abraham Lincoln having won the race to succeed Buchanan, Southern states had begun to secede. Warned that a martial display at this time would wreck chances for negotiations to avert civil war, Buchanan ordered the soldiers to sit out the parade—only to flip-flop later in the day upon hearing his decision had disappointed the people lining the streets.

The controversy over Washington’s birthday on the eve of the Civil War provides perspective on our own so-called “history wars” today. The battle back then was not over whether to save or tear down statues of the Father of Our Country (few could have foreseen such silliness) but over who had the better claim to his legacy: those seeking to save the Union he had forged or those seeking to break away from it.

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Just Call It Washington’s Birthday

In February 1798, President John Adams shocked the then-capital of Philadelphia when one of his terser letters leaked to a newspaper. “I have received your polite invitation,” he wrote, “and embrace the earliest opportunity of informing you that I decline accepting it.” Had the second president tried (and he may have), he couldn’t have found a less tactful way of announcing that he wouldn’t attend a ball in honor of George Washington’s birthday on February 22. Although the usually wise Abigail Adams insisted it would have been improper for her husband as the sitting president to celebrate a former president’s birthday, she got it backward: Among the many reasons to honor Washington was his resolution to retire to private life after two terms in office.

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One man had come to America to bring peace through negotiations. The other had come to impose peace through war. Two hundred fifty years ago this week, Lord Drummond, a Scottish noble acting as an unofficial peace emissary, and Henry Clinton, a high-ranking British general, met on a warship in New York Harbor. The surprise is how much they agreed upon. During their conversation, Clinton summed up his preferred strategy this way: “To gain the hearts and subdue the minds of America.”

With that turn of phrase, a British general fighting to thwart the American Revolution articulated the doctrine that the nation born out of the struggle would later deploy itself in places such as Vietnam and Iraq: winning hearts and minds. Max Boot, in his book about the history of guerrilla warfare, credits Clinton with “the first recorded use of ‘hearts and minds’ in a counterinsurgency context.” No less of an authority than General David Petraeus has written that the phrase remains the “most succinct explanation for how to win a counterinsurgency.”

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When Connecticut Marched on New York

The message showed up on the streets in late January amid fears that the bonds of society were breaking and that neighborhoods would soon be in flames. “Your city, my friends, has been brought into a state truly degrading to the name of Americans,” the anonymous author wrote. Some called on the commander in chief to send troops. If he delayed, the city might become the gateway for a full-fledged invasion of America. “You have it in your power at present to prevent this dreadful event,” read one letter. “Congress have given you authority to take any step in that place.”

Although the quoted passages may sound timely, both come from 250-year-old documents—one an anonymous broadside and the other a letter to General George Washington—about unrest in New York City. Like the situation in Minneapolis today, the one back then led to a debate over whether forces raised outside a state, or rather a colony, should operate inside its borders. This week in January 1776, a delegation from the Continental Congress arrived in New York on a mission to negotiate the unthinkable: the city’s occupation by troops from Connecticut.

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Opportunity Knox

In our era of credentialism, 25-year-old Henry Knox would never have made it to the interview stage for the position of artillery commander in the Continental Army. A look at his résumé would have shown he had dropped out of school, joined a street gang, gotten wrapped up as a witness in a prominent trial for soldiers accused of firing into a crowd (the Boston Massacre), worked as a bookseller, gone parading in a militia uniform, and wed the daughter of a high-ranking British official. If all that wasn’t enough to kill his chances, there was also this: He had ballooned to more than 250 pounds and accidentally shot off two of his own fingers.

Fortunately for America, General George Washington filled the opening based on talent rather than HR dictates or Pentagon mandates against “fat” commanders. On January 18, 1776—250 years ago this week—the trust in Knox paid off when he arrived at the Continental Army’s headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in advance of what he called a “noble train of artillery” carrying what many had thought immovable: the guns of Fort Ticonderoga.

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The Rough Rider Way

The Venezuelan leader’s “outrageous treatment of foreigners who had made investments in Venezuela and his refusal to pay their just claims had led the governments to institute a blockade of Venezuelan ports.” Easy as it is to imagine a U.S. president saying those words, the surprise is which one actually said them: not Donald Trump in 2026, but Theodore Roosevelt more than a century ago.

With Trump’s intervention in Venezuela being dubbed the “Donroe Doctrine”—Donroe instead of Monroe, get it?—it’s worth recalling a forgotten crisis that engulfed Venezuela 123 years ago this winter and that ultimately inspired Roosevelt to put his own spin on the famous Monroe Doctrine with the so-called Roosevelt Corollary.

Between December 1902 and February 1903, it was not American ships blockading Venezuela but German and British ones that their governments had sent to collect debts that the South American country owed. With the self-enriching Venezuelan dictator Cipriano Castro (no relation; it’s just a common name) refusing to meet conditions for payment, Americans worried that the British and especially the upstart Germans would seek compensation through alternative means: seizing territory. If allowed to carve up Venezuela, the European powers would make a mockery of the Monroe Doctrine.

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In our pages today, Eli dives into one chapter of that history, and how it is being used—and abused—in debates about how the West should respond to the ayatollah’s ruthless crackdown on protests in Iran.

President Donald Trump is deciding how far the U.S. will go to intervene on behalf of Iran’s people as its revolution heats up, but American noninterventionists on both the left and right are horrified by the idea of any U.S. involvement. The critics are haunted by memories of the 20th century—specifically by a widely misunderstood power struggle that pitted Iran’s nationalist leader against a young, inexperienced monarch more than 70 years ago.

The episode is the 1953 fall of Mohammad Mossadegh, the prime minister who nationalized Iran’s oil industry and is remembered as a hero by the anti-imperialist left. In the forward to his influential book, All the Shah’s Men, journalist Stephen Kinzer sums up the events as follows: “If the United States had not sent agents to depose Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953, Iran would probably have continued along its path toward full democracy.”

No wonder Mossadegh briefly trended on X this week. Senator Bernie Sanders said the current regime is “itself a product of Western-backed intervention,” citing the fall of Mossadegh.

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Uncommon Common Sense

Had the writer Thomas Paine published Common Sense in the age of social media rather than in January 1776 amid what he called the Age of Reason, some commenters would surely have noted—using one of the more irritating idioms of the internet—that he had dared to say “the quiet part out loud”: America needed to sever ties with Great Britain.

This week marks the 250th anniversary of Paine’s Common Sense beginning its remarkable run as the bestseller of the American Revolution. The 20,000-word pamphlet sold tens of thousands of copies and reached a far larger audience as colonists shared its memorable words with family members and friends in homes and taverns.

Although the 13 colonies were far down the path to independence by January 1776, few people still dared to declare support for it, and none could have done so with Paine’s flair. “There is something absurd, in supposing a continent to be perpetually governed by an island,” he wrote. “In no instance hath nature made the satellite larger than its primary planet; and as England and America, with respect to each other, reverse the common order of nature, it is evident that they belong to different systems. England to Europe: America to itself.” To his mind, the shots fired at Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, had rendered talk of reconciliation ridiculous. “The blood of the slain, the weeping voice of nature cries, ’TIS TIME TO PART.”

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When America Invaded Canada

For all the talk of President Donald Trump breaking with traditions in foreign policy, he has returned the United States to one of its oldest policies when it comes to relations with its neighbor to the north. Long before the 47th president mused about making Canada the 51st state, leaders of the American Revolution entertained the hope that Canada would join them as the 14th colony—and, in the event of independence, the 14th state. Two hundred fifty years ago this week, those hopes suffered a serious setback at the Battle of Quebec.

With our America at 250 coverage this month having focused on religious liberty, it’s fitting to finish December with the story of the failed attempt at union between the largely Protestant 13 colonies and the mostly Catholic population above them in Canada. When General George Washington dispatched a thousand troops to Quebec in September 1775, he gave their commander—the courageous and cantankerous Colonel Benedict Arnold—strict instructions for winning the hearts and minds of the Canadian people. “I also give it in Charge to you to avoid all Disrespect or Contempt of the Religion of the Country,” Washington wrote. “While we are Contending for our own Liberty, we should be very cautious of violating the Rights of Conscience in others.” As the end of the year approached at his headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Washington eagerly awaited good tidings from Canada.

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The First Christmas of the War

Colonel Henry Knox was hoping for a white Christmas but not a whiteout. Some snow would ease the way for the 120,000 pounds of cannons and other artillery that he had promised to transport from Fort Ticonderoga in northern New York to his fellow patriots besieging the British in Boston. It was December 25, 1775, and the 25-year-old Boston bookseller-turned-artillery officer was en route to round up sleds in Albany. But if the snow kept falling this hard, the trails through the woods would vanish from view. Knox would have no path to follow and, like everyone in the field that first Christmas of the Revolutionary War, no way of knowing what lay ahead.

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This year was no different. But as Hanukkah draws to an end, we near ever closer to the 250th birthday of the United States—which gives us reason to tell the story of another set of Jewish heroes as well: those who helped wrest the other Promised Land, America, from the tyranny of the British Empire.

Three weeks after the Declaration of Independence was signed, a man named Jonas Phillips became the proud owner of one of the 200 copies of the Declaration that had been distributed throughout the colonies. Phillips, a devout patriot and the president of a synagogue in Philadelphia, sent his copy to an acquaintance in Amsterdam on the eve of the Revolutionary War, along with a letter in Yiddish expressing strong optimism for the patriot cause. “The Americans have already made themselves like the states of Holland,” he wrote, alluding to the Dutch separatist movement against their Spanish Empire that started two centuries earlier.

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