American Revolution

Today for history we watched one episode from "America, The Story of US". Grace didn't want to watch the first episode about the pilgrims and Jamestown so we skipped to the second about the American Revolution. Of course she did say halfway through it that this time in American history is the one she has studied the most. But we did learn a few interesting tidbits that I had never heard before or maybe just didn't remember them from high school or college history classes. Did you know that more people died in the British prisoner of war ships than on the battlefield. Of course we need to remember this was also during a smallpox outbreak. Smallpox had also made it to George Washington and his soldiers at Valley Forge. George Washington had smallpox as a child. He had the doctors try something very peculiar for that time - the doctors made cuts on the arms of the soldiers that were not sick and then transferred material from the sick soldiers lesions to the cuts. Kind of like a vaccine. It actually worked and only 1 out of every 50 soldiers that were treated that way actually died. Tomorrow we will watch the next episode about Westward Expansion.