Flanked by the Hudson River to the east and the Delaware River to the west, Bergen County comprised one of the most vital theaters of the Revolutionary War. An army that could control it could drive a fateful wedge between New England and the other colonies.

In The Revolutionary War in Bergen County, Carol Karels and her team of scholars weave a masterful account of the war in northeastern New Jersey. Here in Bergen County General Washington took the young Marquis de Lafayette under his wing; here in Bergen County the future antagonists Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton were baptized by fire; here in Bergen County families–in a prelude to the Civil War–split bitterly along Loyalist and Patriotic lines. From Washington’s miraculous November 1776 retreat to the Delaware to the beginning of the Continental Army’s epic August 1781 march to destiny at Yorktown, The Revolutionary War in Bergen County, comprehensively encompasses one of the Revolutionary War’s most dramatic and pivotal fronts.