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A Book of the Revolutionary War battle of Yorktown by master historian Burke Davis.
Describes the siege of Yorktown which caused Lord Cornwallis and his British troops to surrender to General Washington and his Continental Army.

An old hand that has lost none of its professional skill uses official records and the words of participants on both sides to retell the perennially fascinating story of Cornwallis at Yorktown (his third book at that site). The drama opens at the conference on the Harlem River between Washington and that "remarkable soldier," the French general Rochambeau, who persuaded him to lead the joint armies to Virginia where Cornwallis, reeling from his disastrous Carolina "victories, " had gone to earth at Yorktown. The reader follows them, hearing the bickerings between the dapper French soldiers and the hard-bitten Americans, admiring Washington, huge on his big horse, meeting the amazing boy-general Lafayette. At Yorktown he watches Cornwallis erecting his massive fortifications, is present at the naval Battle of the Capes, and finally sees a drummer boy mount a parapet and beat a long-unheard call to parley prefacing the British surrender. Obligatory for the Revolutionary War buff and for any reader who likes to witness history as it happened.

Burke Davis

Burke Davis (1913-2006) was a journalist, novelist, and nonfiction writer, best known for popular war histories. A native of North Carolina, he lived for about thirty years in Virginia, and many of his histories and biographies tackled Virginia subjects, such as Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson, George Washington, and Lewis B. "Chesty" Puller. He was awarded the Mayflower Cup in 1959 for his history To Appomattox: Nine April Days, 1865, and the North Carolina Award for Literature in 1973.