premonition

pre-pandemic coincidence i started the book in 2013 took me a long time to write and i just somewhere along my research about washington and the war that fact came up and it was so interesting to me that not a lot of people know about it so from the very beginning when washington took over as the commander of the continental army he had to deal with smallpox and And it was something that perpetually showed up in the colonies and no one really had immunity to it.

The process of inoculation, which was also called variolation because it was the variola virus, was banned in the colonies because of just religious reasons.

and they were superstitious about the science.

But nonetheless, Washington, this was wiping out many more soldiers than actual fighting with the British.

So Washington really couldn't do much about it until later in the war.

So in winter of 1777... really the first hard winner of the war.

Why did you think this was such an important element to the story? How these ideas of enlightenment were actually embedded into a lot of the revolutionary narrative?