“With this excellent book, Passmore and Smulcer have achieved a remarkable feat of writing and presentation. Not only is the book an exceptional scholarly study of the ending of the American Revolution through the eyes of the successful alliance between the French and the Americans, particularly on their final march to Yorktown, but they have also explored that story with rigor, with beautiful writing, and with exceptional artistic design. The writing makes the dry facts of history come to life for an audience that reaches not only the scholar, but the general interested reader and, I think, also appeals to teachers and students.

The incorporation of period images as well as representative images to help bring life to the story is very well done. I would particularly note the map which shows the route that the French and American armies took on their way to Yorktown where they met on that fateful month to defeat the British Army of Lord Cornwallis and effectively end the American Revolution. The map is the only correct representation of the journey of those two armies so that alone requires the attention of anyone interested in the history of the American Revolution and, in fact, American history more generally. Their discovery of each of the towns, and the connection of it on a very handsome pullout map, as well as the route with annotations and its presentation is a remarkable achievement for any historian, let alone amateur historians who worked on this as a passion project.

​

One of their incredible abilities throughout this book is their ability to take a complex and challenging subject—with multiple moving parts as well as personalities and armies from three different nations coming from multiple geographies across the Atlantic seaboard—and bring those disparate lines together into a compelling narrative approach that at once highlights the uniqueness of the individual, but at the same time keeps the whole story moving dramatically forward."