The Great Rebellion

What if George Washington's crossing of the Delaware had led to a catastrophic defeat and the collapse of the American Revolution? This is William Watson's world. As a thirteen-year-old boy from a farm in Graves End near New York City, he is swept up in what he knows as the Great Rebellion - a war that takes the lives of both his parents. He joins the rebel army just before its defeat at the Battle of Brooklyn, and shares its suffering as it retreats across New Jersey into Pennsylvania. He is at Washington's side at the Battle of Trenton, the rebel's final defeat and surrender. Escaping from Hessian captivity, William survives to face the challenges of growing up in British North America. He falls in love, learns a trade, and matures into manhood. He endures another war and overcomes the hardships and dangers of life on the North Carolina frontier. Now eighty years old, William tells his life story, but he is careful not to excuse his sometimes less than admirable behavior. He makes mistakes, suffers their consequences, and is willing to tell the reader about them. Do the British treat the defeated Americans harshly, as they did the Scots and Irish who rebelled during the 18th century, or do they take a gentler approach? The Great Rebellion offers an answer to that question that may surprise you. And what about the rest of the world? Does the failure of the American Revolution stop the French Revolution from occurring or are the grievances that led the long-suffering French to overthrow their King so strong that their rebellion occurred anyway? Again, the answer may surprise you.
About the Author: Lenny Bernstein has been writing fiction for seven years. The Great Rebellion: Book One of The Autobiography of William Watson is his first alternate history. Lenny learned about the Revolutionary War in elementary school. He was taught that, while difficult, an American victory over the British was inevitable. It took a visit to Washington's Crossing State Park, Pennsylvania, in the early 1980s, to learn how desperate the American cause was at the end of 1776 and how close the revolution was to collapsing. This raised an obvious question: what if Americans had lost? He conceived of telling that story as the autobiography of an old man named William Watson who had lived through the failed revolution and its aftermath as a young boy. His idea lay dormant for over two decades until he retired in 2008 and had time to develop William Watson's story. He enrolled in the Great Smokies Writing Program (GSWP) where he discovered that before he could interest readers in his story, he had to learn how to write fiction - a very different skill from writing the hundreds of technical reports he'd authored during his career. With the help of GSWP and his fellow authors in the Appalachian Roundtable, he learned enough to write this book, but he's still learning. Lenny earned a PhD in chemical engineering from Purdue University in 1969, then pursued a forty-year industrial career that focused on environmental issues, most notably climate change. He was an author on the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Third and Fourth Assessment Reports, and was recognized as contributing to that organization's winning half the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize - Al Gore won the other half. Lenny and his wife Danny (Danielle) have lived in Asheville, North Carolina, since 2001. They are avid hikers and have hiked the full length of the Appalachian Trail, most of the high mountains east of the Mississippi, and trails in Australia, Canada, Europe, and New Zealand. Lenny is currently President of Carolina Mountain Club, the oldest and largest hiking and trail-maintaining club in western North Carolina. He also holds a variety of volunteer leadership positions in the Appalachian Trail Conservancy.