This is CBS Eye on the World.

Here's John Batchelor.

This is CBS, I on the World.

I'm John Batchel.

Continuing with Professor Richard Bell,

his new book of The American Revolution and the fate of the world,

the point of view of individuals who came to the Revolutionary War, 1774, 75, 76, to the Treaty of Paris,

1783, and after, of necessity, or something they needed, or some motive that was not about making speeches,

either the way Edmund Burke made speeches in Parliament or John Adams made speeches at the Continental Congress.

No, they had individual motives.

And we come now to the Hessians and the night of Christmas night, 1776,

in a nor'easter, a blizzard also called, in which Washington, with what's left of his army that's

been traced from Manhattan all across New Jersey, decides that he's going to raid the city of Trenton,

the little village of Trenton,

where a regiment, 1,500 Hessian troops are decamped for the winter.

He's going to do this by crossing the Delaware

in that famous portrait of him standing in the brow,

the bow of a longboat being pulled across through ice flows,

and he's going to win a battle, a coordinated battle that doesn't come off that night,

and stem the advance into Pennsylvania,

because he's being squeezed between the British in Philadelphia

and the British in New York. However, I learned from the professor that almost everything I've said

...