Nathaniel Philbrick

We think of the revolution ending in Yorktown, Va. The fact of the matter is that the French defeated the British in a naval battle right in the mouth of Chesapeake Bay. Because the British fleet was coming to rescue Cornwallis, the British general, Washington was able to surround Cornwallis.

To my mind, an adventure is something a person willingly undertakes.

One of the questions I face when working on a book about a historical event is whether I should visit the actual place that I'm writing about. No matter how scrupulously maintained a historic house or battlefield may be, it is nothing like it was in the long-ago past.

Unfortunately, we have a tendency to see figures from the past as caricatures - either all good or all bad - when the truth is always much more complex.

What's been largely forgotten is that Washington was highly passionate and aggressive, and it was only after losing Philadelphia to the British after a string of disastrous battlefield performances that he finally resigned himself to the more conservative approach with which he has since become associated.

Instead of being a page-turner, 'Moby-Dick' is a repository of American history and culture and the essentials of Western literature. The book is so encyclopedic that space aliens could use it to re-create the whale fishery as it once existed on the planet Earth in the midst of the 19th century.

There's an ugly civil war side to revolutionary Boston that we don't often talk about and a lot of thuggish, vigilante behavior by groups like the Sons of Liberty.

Whatever you read, there's no better place to read than the cockpit or the berth of a boat. It's kind of like being in a womb.

I had a great AP U.S. History teacher in Pittsburgh. We still exchange Christmas cards. She was the first teacher who said I was a good writer - and I'd never heard that before. And so I remember that, and I remember that level of loving the material and really loving writing about it.

The irony is that Washington was, in reality, very much like Benedict Arnold. The big difference was that Washington was ultimately able to control his emotions, something Arnold never learned to do.

We think of Washington as the defensive-minded pragmatist who won the Revolution by avoiding unnecessary risks on the battlefield. But that was not how he started out.

For the very young, there's nothing better than Mother Goose and anything by Dr. Seuss for the rhythms and language.