Battle of Bunker Hill

On June 17, 1775, some 2,400 British regulars assaulted a fortified American position on Breed's Hill — misidentified then and forever after as Bunker Hill — in the first major land engagement of the Revolutionary War. The redcoats took the hill. They took it on the third assault, after two charges had been broken by withering fire from colonial militiamen who had never stood in a pitched battle before. When it was over, the British had suffered more than 1,000 casualties — nearly 40 percent of the assault force — and both sides had learned something they hadn't known before.

What the British learned was that this rebellion would not collapse at the first show of professional military force. What the Americans learned — and it was the more consequential lesson — was that they could fight. Untrained farmers and tradesmen, many of them armed with hunting rifles rather than military muskets, had held a fortified line against the most disciplined infantry in the world for two full charges before running out of ammunition. The putative defeat gave the Continental cause something it desperately needed: proof that resistance was not suicidal.

The hill is in Charlestown, Massachusetts, now part of Boston, and the Bunker Hill Monument — a 221-foot granite obelisk completed in 1843 — marks the site. Dr. Joseph Warren, one of the most capable leaders the patriot cause had produced, was killed in the final British charge, shot at close range after the Americans ran out of powder. He was 34. Had he lived, historians have speculated, the war's political history might have looked quite different. Wars are often defined as much by who is lost in their early moments as by anything that follows.