It represents a series of events that happened during the 20-day siege. The Siege of Yorktown by Louis-Nicolas Van Blarenberghe, court painter of battles to France’s King Louis XVI is the painter’s copy of the original is at the Palace of Versailles. Ultimately, after struggling to retain its 13 feisty colonies, British leaders chose to abandon the battlefields of North America and turn their attention to their other colonial outposts, like India. The Dutch Republic, too, traded weapons and other goods to the American colonists. Both France and Spain, to undermine British power, provided both arms and troops to the rambunctious rebels. At the time of the American Revolution, other European powers were seeking to restrain Great Britain, the greatest world power and owner of the planet’s most threatening navy. In that conflict, Britain was able to consolidate its strength, while France and Spain experienced significant losses. The roots of this war lay in the global Seven Years War, known in the United States as the French and Indian War. “As the war became bigger and involved other allies for American and other conflicts around the world, that led Britain to make the kind of strategic decisions it did, to ultimately grant the colonies independence and use their military resources elsewhere in the world.” Allison, project director, curator of the show and co-author of a new forthcoming book on the subject. “If it had not become that broader conflict, the outcome might very well have been different,” says David K. “The American Revolution: A World War” demonstrates with new scholarship how the 18th-century fight for independence fit into a larger, international conflict that involved Great Britain, France, Spain, the Dutch Republic, Jamaica, Gibraltar and even India. When Americans think of world wars, they picture 20th-century scenes-the blood-drenched trenches at the Battle of the Somme where a million men were injured or killed in 1916, the German blitz that rained death down on London night after night during the autumn of 1940, or the ugly mushroom cloud rising like a behemoth above Hiroshima in August 1945.Ī new exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., invites Americans to recognize another world war-one that has been traditionally envisioned as a quaint and simple confrontation between a ragtag army of rebellious colonists and a king’s mighty military force of red-coated Brits.
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