perhaps we should all watch this tonight on pbs:
Rebels and Redcoats: How Britain Lost America
With vivid dramatizations of battles, eyewitness accounts, original documents and paintings, REBELS AND REDCOATS: HOW BRITAIN LOST AMERICA tells the story of the American Revolution from an unusual point of view - that of the British losers. Presented by renowned British military historian Richard Holmes, this four-part series airs on PBS Wednesdays, June 23-30, 2004, 9:00 p.m. ET in two-hour segments.
REBELS AND REDCOATS focuses on the military struggle - the soldiers, the leaders, the tactics and the strategy of this grand conflict, but it also explores the painful conflicts within the American people themselves. It tells of the bitter disappointments of black slaves in the South, promised freedom by the British, and takes viewers inside the vicious struggles of brothers, friends and families forced to choose sides between loyalists and rebels.
The series traces the ups and downs of this drama from the beginning of the insurrection in Boston to the surrender of the British forces to Washington in Yorktown. REBELS AND REDCOATS puts the war in the context of the world events that so affected its outcome, and that helped to put a powerful new player, the United States, on the world map.
Says executive producer Zvi Dor Ner, "Most Americans know only one story line when it comes to the American Revolution; I hope that REBELS AND REDCOATS will surprise and delight them by proposing a different one, a story of the War of Independence told from the point of view of the loser, viewing the events that separated America from Britain more as a civil war than a revolution."
