Thomas Fleming, "a prolific historian with a zealous interest in America's founding fathers and a historical novelist whose plots included a British conspiracy to kidnap George Washington," died July 23, the New York Times reported. He was 90. In addition to biographies of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, Fleming "chronicled the battles of Bunker Hill and Lexington and Concord and a lesser-known one in Springfield, N.J., in 1780. He wrote about the seminal year 1776. And he looked back at the duel in 1804 between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton."
Although he occasionally departed from the Revolutionary era, Fleming would return to the period that most fascinated him, as he did in The Great Divide: The Conflict Between Washington and Jefferson That Defined a Nation (2015) and The Strategy of Victory: How General George Washington Won the American Revolution, which will be published in October by Da Capo Press.
Historian David McCullough called Fleming a gifted storyteller: "He was a man of natural ease with people and with stories. He had that good Irish ability to express in person and on paper.... He worked all the time, and he wasn't just knocking the books out. He was writing quality books."