This is the first in a new series of podcasts. Long time listeners will remember that when my book Daniel Morgan: A Revolutionary Life was published, I did a number of podcasts with experts delving into aspects of Daniel Morgan’s life—from the place where he lived, to how he was flogged, to the rifles that he carried. But I thought that this was unsatisfactory for a podcast called “Historically Thinking”. It’s the conversations that historians have before they write a book that show how a research project comes together, and how historical thinking gets done.

So, in something of a leap of faith, I’m going to have conversations with other historians on topics that apply to a project that I’m now working on…more about that, perhaps, at the end of our conversation. In effect I'm doing podcasts on spec, which fills me with superstitious dread. 

My guest today Mark Anderson, author of Down the Warpath to the Cedars: Indians’ First Battles in the Revolution. It's a fascinating study of native politics, diplomacy, and war on the Canadian border during the first year of the American Revolution, a politics which would have confused a Renaissance Italian diplomat.

Mark has previously written The Battle for the Fourteenth Colony: America’s War of Liberation in Canada, 1774-1776. In a previous life, before establishing himself as one of the few American authorities on revolutionary-era Canada, he was an officer in the United States Air Force.