Usually, history celebrates the victories in war — Ulysses S. Grant crossing the Mississippi River on the way to Vicksburg, Theodore Roosevelt and the Rough Riders charging up San Juan Hill, the American troops storming ashore at Normandy.
But this is the 240th anniversary of one of the biggest losses of the American Revolution — for the Americans, that is. And in Brooklyn, where it happened, people are, if not celebrating, at least excited.
“It’s still a cool battle,” said Andrew Sapini, 17, who completed his Eagle Scout project at the Old Stone House, a 1699 Dutch farmhouse on the edge of Park Slope that was the backdrop for a crucial scene in the Battle of Brooklyn.
Of course Brooklynites call it the Battle of Brooklyn. Some less Brooklyn-centric accounts, like the one in “The Encyclopedia of New York City,” refer to it as the Battle of Long Island, because Brooklyn is actually on the western tip of Long Island. Ron Schweiger, a Brooklyn borough historian, said that the Battle of Brooklyn was a relatively new name. Even as unstinting a Brooklynite as Walt Whitman referred to the Battle of Long Island in 1858.
