Andrew J. O'Shaughnessy

Andrew O’Shaughnessy is the former Saunders Director of the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello.

As one of the driving passions of his life, this account reveals underappreciated elements of Jefferson’s character, his abilities, and his skills through which he aimed to encourage progress and extend happiness among a greater number of people.

The loss of America was a stunning and unexpected defeat for the powerful British Empire. Common wisdom has held that incompetent military commanders and political leaders in Britain must have been to blame, but were they? In The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire, historian Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy makes a different argument. Weaving together the personal stories of ten prominent men who directed the British dimension of the war, he dispels the incompetence myth and uncovers the real reasons that rebellious colonials were able to achieve their surprising victory.