Cardinal News 250

Foreign military officers referred to the American military as “speckled,” owing to the diverse racial makeup of its troops.

We embarked on a multi-year project to tell the little-known stories of Virginia’s role in the American Revolution. Here’s what we’ve learned so far.

Meanwhile, the Continental Congress has put George Washington in charge of a Patriot army just days before yet another battle with British regulars in Massachusetts.

Jack Jouett is the Paul Revere of Virginia but Revere is not the Jouett of Massachusetts.

When the Revolutionary War ended in 1783, a state census revealed that in some parts of Augusta County, slavery was so commonplace that one in three households owned at least one enslaved Black person.

On this month’s Cardinal 250 podcast, we talk with Matthew Webster of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation about the Magazine, its history and its future.

Angered that the royal governor had spirited Colonists’ gunpowder onto a British vessel, the Hanover County militia threatened to take it back. Dunmore agreed to pay for the gunpowder instead.

Virginia’s Gunpowder Incident has been called “the second shot heard around the world,” although no shots were actually fired.

John Wyatt talked his way out of a prisoner of war camp with a barrel of rum. He then used forged documents to infiltrate Tories in the New River Valley who were planning to attack the lead mines in modern-day Wythe County.

We talk with Michael Hudson, executive director of Historic Smithfield in Montgomery County.