NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Turn: Washington’s Spies, now an original series on AMC Based on remarkable new research, acclaimed historian Alexander Rose brings to life the true story of the spy ring that helped America win the Revolutionary War. For the first time, Rose takes us beyond the battlefront and deep into the shadowy underworld of double agents and triple crosses, covert operations and code breaking, and unmasks the courageous, flawed men who inhabited this wilderness of mirrors—including the spymaster at the heart of it all. In the summer of 1778, with the war poised to turn in his favor, General George Washington desperately needed to know where the British would strike next. To that end, he unleashed his secret weapon: an unlikely ring of spies in New York charged with discovering the enemy’s battle plans and military strategy. Washington’s small band included a young Quaker torn between political principle and family loyalty, a swashbuckling sailor addicted to the perils of espionage, a hard-drinking barkeep, a Yale-educated cavalryman and friend of the doomed Nathan Hale, and a peaceful, sickly farmer who begged Washington to let him retire but who always came through in the end. Personally guiding these imperfect everyday heroes was Washington himself. In an era when officers were gentlemen, and gentlemen didn’ t spy, he possessed an extraordinary talent for deception—and proved an adept spymaster. The men he mentored were dubbed the Culper Ring. The British secret service tried to hunt them down, but they escaped by the closest of shaves thanks to their ciphers, dead drops, and invisible ink. Rose’s thrilling narrative tells the unknown story of the Revolution–the murderous intelligence war, gunrunning and kidnapping, defectors and executioners—that has never appeared in the history books. But Washington’s Spies is also a spirited, touching account of friendship and trust, fear and betrayal, amid the dark and silent world of the spy.

Nicholas Cresswell was twenty-four years old when he left his birthplace of Edale, England to sail for Virginia, believing that ""a person with a small fortune may live much better and make greater improvements in America than he can possibly do in England."" From the time he left, sailing from Liverpool in 1774, until the time he returned, he kept a diary detailing his experiences in pre-Revolutionary America. As a loyal subject to King George, Cresswell found himself often unhappy in America, detailing the turmoil and abuses often suffered by Loyalists in the colonies. Confining his travel mainly to the mid-Atlantic region, Cresswell not only had occasion to attend a slave gathering and observe what went on there, but also traded amongst many of the native tribes, including the Lenape, Tuscarora, Ottawa and Shawnee. Despite his ambivalence about returning to England, (toward the end of the book he moans, ""I wish to be at home and yet dread the thought of returning to my native Country a Beggar "" (P. 251)), life in the colonies becomes too much for this loyal subject and Cresswell's journal ends in 1777 with his return to England.

This accessible work provides a detailed picture of the history of one of the most important companies in the electronic industry.