Description

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Often hailed as the godfather of today’s elite special forces, Robert Rogers trained and led an unorthodox unit of green provincials, raw woodsmen, farmers, and Indian scouts on “impossible” missions in colonial America that are still the stuff of soldiers’ legend. The child of marginalized Scots-Irish immigrants, Rogers learned to survive in New England’s dark and deadly forests, grasping, as did few others, that a new world required new forms of warfare. John F. Ross not only re-creates Rogers’s life and his spectacular battles with breathtaking immediacy and meticulous accuracy, but brings a new and provocative perspective on Rogers’s unique vision of a unified continent, one that would influence Thomas Jefferson and inspire the Lewis and Clark expedition. Rogers’s principles of unconventional war-making would lay the groundwork for the colonial strategy later used in the War of Independence—and prove so compelling that army rangers still study them today. Robert Rogers, a backwoods founding father, was heroic, admirable, brutal, canny, ambitious, duplicitous, visionary, and much more—like America itself.

About the Author

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John F. Ross is executive editor of American Heritage magazine and a former member of the Board of Editors at Smithsonian magazine, where he wrote six cover stories. His articles have been published in Reader’s Digest, Parade, the New York Times, Newsweek, the Washington Post, the Sunday Telegraph, and more. He has appeared on more than fifty radio and television programs and has keynoted conferences across the continent. His organization of the most northern canoe trip ever taken earned him a membership in the Explorers Club. On assignment he has dogsledded with the Polar Inuit in northwestern Greenland, technical mountain climbed in Siberia, and dived 3,000 feet in the Galápagos. He is the author of Living Dangerously and lives in Bethesda, Maryland.

Praise For…

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“A lively, evocative and at times moving biography . . . Ross [brings] this extraordinary man back to life.”—The Wall Street Journal

“Nothing less than a tour de force that will appeal to a wide range of readers . . . This remarkable book should go far to rescue a once-famous figure in American history.”—Winston-Salem Journal
 
“In this exhaustive book, variously scholarly and white-knuckle exciting, John Ross has done the great man justice.”—The Washington Times
 
“Rousing . . . The story of Rogers, as told by Ross, is an American tale.”—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
 
“[A] sweeping account . . . a thrilling narrative.”—The Boston Globe