Let me see if I can do better......
Basically the colonists in the North American Continent were not going to recognize the stamp act of 1765 (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stamp_Act_1765), taxing them without representation and therefore a violation of their rights, as imposed by the Parliament of Great Britain. This sparked a war: the American Revolutionary War.
So the place for the setting is Eastern America, the Frontier. The battle of Trenton, The battle of Brooklyn, Valley Forge Pennsylvania. Similar incidents.
What is happening? The war that ended up with the founding of U.S.A. This is the time of these figures in American History:
1) George Washington, Commander-in-chief of the Continental Army. He would go on to become the first president of the united states.
2) Benjamin Franklin, a founding father of the United States and a man of many talents and professions in arts, sciences, politics, civics, and others.
3) Paul Revere, a silversmith, a man of industry, and most famously known for alerting the colonial militia of the approaching British army before the battles of Lexington and Concord. "The British are coming! The British are coming!"
4) Charles Lee, previously a british soldier who shall become the General of the Continental Army.
5) Lafayette, a french aristocrat who became a war general in the American Revolutionary War. Serving a major-general under George Washington.
6) Samuel Adams, Political Philosopher, statesman. He was on the front lines of the legal side of things, writing the "Adams Instructions" in response to the sugar Act of 1764. The term "taxation without representation" for what was to become United States of America was coined here as he made the first legal, political, and for all intents and purposes official unified defense of the colonists' rights. The first political body making the first on record statement that Parliament could not rightly tax them. His contention was that the Parliament did not have sovereignty over the Colonists. A year later the Stamp Act was passed by the Parliament. This caused an uproar in the colonies. From there it all erupted and...well, not to be too cliche but, "the rest is history" as the saying goes.
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So far as the player's role? The main character seems to be loosely based off of Joseph Brant of the Mohawk nation of Native Americans.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Revolution#Native_Americans)
Native Americans
Main article: Native Americans
Further information: Western theater of the American Revolutionary War
Most Native Americans rejected pleas that they remain neutral and supported the British Crown, both because of trading relationships and its efforts to prohibit colonial settlement west of the Appalachian Mountains. The great majority of the 200,000 Native Americans east of the Mississippi distrusted the colonists and supported the British cause, hoping to forestall continued colonial encroachment on their territories.[67] Those tribes that were more closely involved in colonial trade tended to side with the revolutionaries, although political factors were important as well.
Although there was limited participation by Native American warriors except for those associated with four of the Iroquois nations in New York and Pennsylvania, the British provided Indians with funding and weapons to attack American outposts. Some Indians tried to remain neutral, seeing little value in joining a European conflict and fearing reprisals from whichever side they opposed. The Oneida and Tuscarora peoples of western New York supported the American cause.[68]
The British provided arms to Indians, who were led by Loyalists in war parties to raid frontier settlements from the Carolinas to New York. They killed many scattered settlers, especially in Pennsylvania. In 1776 Cherokee war parties attacked American colonists all along the southern frontier of the uplands.[69] While the Chickamauga Cherokee could launch raids numbering a couple hundred warriors, as seen in the Chickamauga Wars, they could not mobilize enough forces to fight a major invasion without the help of allies, most often the Creek.
Joseph Brant of the powerful Mohawk nation, part of the Iroquois Confederacy based in New York, was the most prominent Native American leader against the rebel forces. In 1778 and 1780, he led 300 Iroquois warriors and 100 white Loyalists in multiple attacks on small frontier settlements in New York and Pennsylvania, killing many settlers and destroying villages, crops and stores.[70] The Seneca, Onondaga and Cayuga of the Iroquois Confederacy also allied with the British against the Americans. In 1779 the Continentals retaliated with an American army under John Sullivan, which raided and destroyed 40 empty Iroquois villages in central and western New York.[71] Sullivan's forces systematically burned the villages and destroyed about 160,000 bushels of corn that comprised the winter food supply. Facing starvation and homeless for the winter, the Iroquois fled to the Niagara Falls area and to Canada, mostly to what became Ontario. The British resettled them there after the war, providing land grants as compensation for some of their losses.[72]
At the peace conference following the war, the British ceded lands which they did not really control, and did not consult their Indian allies. They "transferred" control to the Americans of all the land east of the Mississippi and north of Florida. The historian Calloway concludes:
Burned villages and crops, murdered chiefs, divided councils and civil wars, migrations, towns and forts choked with refugees, economic disruption, breaking of ancient traditions, losses in battle and to disease and hunger, betrayal to their enemies, all made the American Revolution one of the darkest periods in American Indian history.[73]
The British did not give up their forts in the West (what is now the Ohio to Wisconsin) until 1796; they kept alive the dream of forming a satellite Indian nation there, which they called a Neutral Indian Zone. That goal was one of the causes of the War of 1812.[74][75]
Personally I guess my motivation for interest in this game is as a matter of national pride, and of cultural and indirect ancestral interest. No matter how skewed, accurate, contrary, or agreeable the game's portrayal might be.
I hope one day in the not-too-distant future I can go to my own tribal lands and familiarize myself more with my heritage. But enough about this.
Hope this helps.