Oblong Online: Book Launch - Jack Kelly - "Valcour: The 1776 Campaign That Saved the Cause of Liberty," in conversation with Terry Golway.

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Award-winning author and historian Jack Kelly will talk about his new book VALCOUR - a wild and suspenseful story of one of the most crucial and least known campaigns of the Revolutionary War when America’s scrappy navy took on the full might of Britain’s sea power - with journalist and author, Terry Golway.

Author images: Jack Kelly credit Jeff Grouw; Terry Golway credit Jimmy Vielkind.

During the summer of 1776, a British incursion from Canada loomed. In response, citizen-soldiers of the newly independent nation mounted a heroic defense. Patriots constructed a small fleet of gunboats on Lake Champlain in northern New York and confronted the Royal Navy in a desperate three-day battle near Valcour Island. Their effort surprised the arrogant British and forced the enemy to call off their invasion.
Valcour is a story of people. The northern campaign of 1776 was led by the underrated general Philip Schuyler (Hamilton's father-in-law), the ambitious former British officer Horatio Gates, and the notorious Benedict Arnold. An experienced sea captain, Arnold devised a brilliant strategy that confounded his slow-witted opponents.

Jack Kelly is an award-winning author and historian. His books include Band of Giants: The Amateur Soldiers Who Won America’s Independence, which received the DAR History Medal. He is also the author of The Edge of Anarchy, Heaven’s Ditch, and Gunpowder. He has published five novels and is a New York Foundation for the Arts fellow in Nonfiction Literature. Kelly has appeared on The History Channel, National Public Radio, and C-Span. He lives in New York's Hudson Valley.

Terry Golway is Senior Editor at POLITICO and the author of Frank & Al: FDR, Al Smith, and the Unlikely Alliance That Created the Modern Democratic Party, Irish Rebel: John Devoy and America's Fight for Ireland's Freedom and Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics. He has been a columnist and city editor at the New York Observer, a member of the editorial board of the New York Times, and a columnist for the Irish Echo.