History, Myth, and Feeding Washington's Army

I my guest today is Dr. Ricardo Herrera, an award-winning historian and Professor of Military History at the School of Advanced Military Studies, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College. A scholar of eighteenth and nineteenth-century U.S. military history, he is the author of Feeding Washington’s Army: Surviving the Valley Forge Winter of 1778 (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2021), For Liberty and the Republic: The American Citizen as Soldier, 1775-1861 (New York: New York University Press, 2015), and of numerous articles and chapters on U.S. military history. Dr. Herrera is the recipient of several residential research fellowships, including a Maynooth University (Ireland) Arts & Humanities Institute Visiting Fellowship, 2020-2021; a Residential Research Fellowship (2016-2017) at The Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington, Mount Vernon, Virginia; a Society of the Cincinnati Scholars’ Grant (2015-2016); and a Residential Research Fellowship at the David Library of the American Revolution (2014-2015). Dr. Herrera has also been awarded a 2016 Moncado Prize by the Society for Military History for “‘[T]he zealous activity of Capt. Lee’: Light-Horse Harry Lee and Petite Guerre,” and two Distinguished Writing Awards from the Army Historical Foundation in 2012 and 2021 for “Foraging and Combat Operations at Valley Forge, February-March 1778” and “‘[O]ur Army will hut this Winter at Valley forge’: George Washington, Decision-Making, and the Councils of War.” He is now completing the tentatively titled A Most Uncommon Soldier: The Life, Letters, and Journal of Edward Ashley Bowen Phelps, 1814-1893, an edited collection, to be published by the University Press of Kansas.