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Fascinating and Lesser Known People Who Changed American History

Khalid Elhassan May 5, 2020 33 min

Normandy landings - Operation Overlord — Men of the 320th in Normandy. YouTube

15. The English Civil War Was Also Fought in America

American originals such as Colonel Thomas Rainsborough and his Puritan followers sailed across the Atlantic to fight in the English Civil War in England. That war also traveled in the opposite direction, crossing the Atlantic to be fought on American soil. By the 1650s, the English Civil War was all over, and Parliament had decisively defeated the royalists. King Charles I had been captured, tried, convicted, and beheaded, his heir had fled to the continent, and England was ruled by a Lord Protector, the Puritan Oliver Cromwell.

However, small-scale fighting still flared up every now and then between Royalists and Parliamentarians. One such flare-up, which came to be known as the Battle of the Severn, took place on American soil near Annapolis, Maryland, on March 25^th, 1655.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.