My 72nd Audible narration is out, and as usual, I’m announcing it here first. PM me for a free review copy if it strikes your fancy.

A year after John Bradstreet’s raid of 1758—the first and largest British-American riverine raid mounted during the French and Indian War—Benjamin Franklin hailed it as one of the great “American” victories of the war. Bradstreet heartily agreed, and his own official account was adopted by early historians.

In this first comprehensive analysis of Bradstreet’s raid, Ian Macpherson McCulloch uses never-before-seen materials to dispel many of the myths that have grown up around the operation. The result is a deeply researched, unvarnished, balanced account of a critical moment in early American military history.

The raid looks markedly different than Bradstreet’s heroic portrayal. The operation was carried out principally by American colonial soldiers, and McCulloch lets many of the provincial participants give voice to their own experiences. He gives Bradstreet’s opponents’ side of the story.

McCulloch also examines the riverine operational capability that Bradstreet put in place, a new water-borne style of combat that the British-American army would soon successfully deploy in the campaigns of Niagara (1759) and Montreal (1760).